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LIBRARY OF CONGRESS, 

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UNITED STATES OF AMERICA. 



NEW ENGLAND BYGONES. 



BY 

E. H, ARR. 






(cOZSJ'' 



PHILADELPHIA: 

J. B. LIPPINCOTT & CO. 

1880. 



if' 



Copyright, 1880, by J. B. LinuNCOTT & Co. 



• / 






TO THE MEMORY 



OF 



MY ELDEST DAUGHTER, MARION, 

WHO DEARLY LOVED NATURE, 
AND TO 

MY SON PHILIP, 

WHO WILL, I TRUST, IN THIS RESPECT RESEMBLE HER, 

THIS LITTLE BOOK 

IS TENDERLY DEDICATED. 



PREFACE. 



This little book is published with no thought 
of an audience. It tells of real scenes, and 
of people who w^ere actors in them ; but the 
life it deals with is so very simple that it can 
hardly satisfy the exacting appetite of the 
reading public. 

It is permitted to go into print, especially 
for three children, with hope that their curi- 
osity and aifections may be stimulated by it 
towards those ancestors from whom they have 
gotten much of the good which is in them, 
and that from it they may turn with desire 
and appreciation to sources of what have been 
to me abundant and enduring riches. 

Very delightful have been these reminis- 
cences, taking me back to bygone days and 
much good company ; reframing delicious pic- 

5 



6 PREFACE. 



tures which have kept their color through 
forty years. 

The children will read the book, because 
they will be partial. Some old-time country 
livers, caught by its title, may run over its 
pages, recognize familiar things, and be quick- 
ened by them into pleasant memories. 

All the more flattering will be this increase 
of readers, because I shall know that the 
hearts of such have been enriched by their 
sweet experiences of rural life. 

E. H. A. 



CONTENTS. 



CHAPTEU 

I. — Etchings 






PAGE 

9 


II. The Farm 






23 


III.— The Farm-House 






36 


IV.— SPRINa-TlME AND HAYING 






54 


V. The Visit . . 






73 


VI. — Little Benny . 






89 


VII.— The Burial-Place . 






98 


VIII. Hannah and Jonathan . 






. Ill 


IX. — The Weekly Koutine 






125 


X. — Neighbors .... 






. 132 


XI.— Sunday .... 






146 


XII. Old Trees . . . 






. 159 


XIII.— The District School 


' 




. 174 


XIV. — After the Summer . 






. 190 


XV. — Winter Pleasures . 






. 200 



NEW ENGLAND BYGONES. 



CHAPTER I. 



ETCHINGS. 



In ;N"orthern 'New England, in the tradi- 
tional good old times, to own a house was 
a condition of thrifty citizenship. For this a 
young couple would toil early and late w^ith 
heroic self-denial. No matter how humhle 
this home was, it must he one's own. When 
a man married, he at once set up a household, 
and, as he needed, he let out his four walls, 
and seamed and patched them. His barns ran 
over, and he added to them. He planted an 
orchard, and set out poplars before his door. 
The roughness of toil was ground into his 
bones and muscles. He grew hard-featured 
and hard-fisted, while his w^ife grew jaded and 
angular. Their children became like them. 
They were all weather-changed into a kind of 
peculiar peasantry, — a readily recognized prod- 

2 9 



10 NEW ENGLAND BYGONES. 

uct of their condition, — tlie busy, lionest, per- 
sistent, hopeful, helpful 'New England farmer's 
family. The visible signs of their labors were 
hardly more than an orchard of straggling 
trees; the annual rotation of crops; and the 
daily spilling out from the doors of family- 
life. It was a most simple living, easily 
described with few words; but the core of 
progressive culture, the nursery of strong 
character. 

Their houses and their surroundings were 
such as might be expected. The apple-trees, 
which they set out, bore crabbed fruit, and 
were of little value ; but, as a feature of farm- 
life, they served their purpose. There were 
always good apples enough for home use. 
The names of some of them, given by acci- 
dent, became household words; and, when 
they had lived their life out, the excellence of 
their fruits passed into tradition. I could walk 
to-day to the very spot where stood Farmer 
M.'s Long-nose and Pudding-sweet, — two 
ragged, stalwart trees, famous in the district. 
The mildly-sour Long-nose tasted best when 
just picked from the greensward, and the 
mealy Pudding-sweet when sucked by the 
eater while sitting upon a low-lying branch 
of the tree which bore it. 

An old orchard is a friendly place. Wher- 



ETCHINGS, 11 



ever you stumble upon one tlie spirit of home- 
likeness and past occupation are with it. If 
there are no house-walls to be seen, you are 
sure to find near by the rubbish of them, by 
which you know that once the simple processes 
of farm-life went daily on under its trees. The 
jagged, sprouting old stumps are the record 

of it. 

On the whole, what farm appendage was 
better in possession, is better in memory, than 
its riotous old orchard? It was, in spring, a 
rose-2:arden, which scented the air with attar, 
and filled the landscape with a transient glory. 
In summer, standing in the foreground of its 
overtopping verdure, the houses let out into it 
the homeliness of their vocations. Then into 
the postures and implements of housewives, 
and the work they did, passed the glamour of 
its growth and its sunshine. In it, and by 
it, people and things, otherwise unattractive, 
became beautiful incidents and accidents of 
it. You have not forgotten the bare-armed 
women, spreading their linen to bleach; pans 
scalding in the sunshine ; the bee-hives ; the 
grindstone; the mowers whetting their scythes, 
and other loose-lying debris of farm-work; the 
picturesque absorption of the orchard's sum- 
mer-life. You hold fast in memory some 
tree, or trees, the ripening and gradual gath- 



12 NEW ENGLAND BYGONES. 

ering of whose fruits were happy features of 
your childhood. 

The orchard almost always started from the 
back-door of a farm-house, where burdocks 
and other rank-smelling weeds grew and waste 
waters trickled out; but it stretched into a 
verdure, the sweetness and cleanliness and ten- 
derness of which could only be found under 
its trees. Here night-dews lingered, and 
apples mellowed toothsomely, under the mat- 
ted grass. Here was the couch of the tired 
laborer and the play-ground of children, wdio 
wore ruts in its sod, and half lived in summer 
upon its forage. 

The Lombardy poplars, which were planted 
in front of these earlier farm-houses, were stiff, 
compact, erect trees, always aggressive upon 
the landscape. They were fast-growing, but 
of short-lived vigor, and died by early though 
slow decay. They were perhaps the natural 
outcrop of a generation which began and ended 
with shoulder to the plough, and hand to the 
distaff; whose chief literature was the Bible ; 
whose law was truth, and whose highest recre- 
ation was the rest of the Sabbath. You still 
see, here and there, these aged poplars scat- 
tered through ISTew England. They are ghosts 
of trees, half dead, often isolated ; yet, should 
search be made, sure to be found standing 



ETCHINGS. 13 



steadfast by the site of an ancient homestead. 
Often they linger in front of a square, flat- 
roofed old house, given over, like themselves, 
to decay ; both come down from a long dead 
generation. They have a way of lifting them- 
selves up and standing out from a landscape. 
One sees them from afar, like index-fingers, 
pointing backwards, not without pathos, to the 
past. 

If the farmers who planted these trees 
seemed hard and stern, it was owing largely 
to their resolute fidelity to the necessities of 
their vocation. They were pioneers ; the hew- 
ers out of a path to a broader culture. They 
were not unlike their own hills, which, though 
rugged and steep, were, at the same time, the 
glory of the landscape. They loved the homes 
to which they had given the richness and 
strength of their days. That power of asso- 
ciation which comes from dwelling long in a 
spot, and which clings eternally to it, took 
deep root in them. At the same time, there 
went out from them, into their walls and fur- 
nishings, that sweetness of life-expression given 
to them by long use. Time mellowed their 
homes; scars enriched them ; necessity added 
to them, — until, from very bare beginnings, 
grew the quaintly furnished, picturesque, sim- 
pl}^ beautiful old farm-houses. 



14 NEW ENGLAND BYGONES. 

Very miicli of the thrift and honesty pe- 
culiar to the ITew England race has flowed 
through tins primitive and sturdy stock. 
Looking hack, I see men and women whose 
characters were of the best ; the lines of which, 
like etchings, are sharp and suggestive. 

The last time I ever saw old Farmer M. he 
was firmly grasping a pitchfork, which was 
planted in his load; and, from his cart, was 
giving directions to half a score of stalwart 
laborers. His hat was weather-beaten; his 
garments were coarse and ill-fitting. To one 
unused to country life, he would have seemed 
a rough old man, — a common farmer; the 
worn-out owner of a few acres and a little 
money, gotten by working while others slept ; 
by self-denial when indulgence would have 
seemed a virtue ; one who doubled the toils of 
summer, and cheated himself out of the rest of 
winter, — a sort of barren waif, almost cast out 
from one century upon the shore of another. 

Altogether otherwise this man seemed to 
me. I had known him from my earliest 
childhood. He had done faithfully the work 
which had been given him to do. Whatever 
lay within its scope and possibilities he had 
accomplished. Whatever of dignity could be 
given, by truth and industry and self-respect, 
to a farmer's life, had been given to his. Forty 



ETCHINGS. 15 



years before he had been a rustic king in his 
fields. He was a king still, — this old man of 
eighty-odd years. There was the same stamp 
of force upon him. He was old age wiser 
than youth ; decay more potent than growth ; 
weakness dictating to strength. Time had 
ploughed over him ; but, if his hand had 
lost its cunning, his eye had not lost its fire. 
If his body was wellnigh spent, his intellect 
was unabated. As he stood, poised upon the 
fruits of his harvest, ruling, with positive will 
and clear judgment, his laborers of a later 
generation, he seemed like the old hero that 
he was ; a half-defiant conqueror over circum- 
stance, brave and resistant to the last. It was 
grand to see him, this half-wild son of nature, 
standing clear-cut against the blue sky, held 
up by the instruments and adjuncts of a life 
of toil ; the wrinkled, aged harvester, tossed 
out at his last, with a sort of fierce gesture, 
into this transient, but suggestive, picture. 
Clad in homespun, roughened by toil, with no 
acquired graces of speech, there was yet about 
him a certain expression of inborn dignity 
which compelled respect. His eye was pierc- 
ing ; his voice incisive ; his words few ; his 
manner forcible. He was an eager, honest, 
successful man, who had taken and held life 
by siege and storm. 



16 ^^EW ENGLAND BYGONES. 

This farmer's story will be read hereafter in 
character; not in books. It would be tame 
written out, the daily life of this man, who, 
through all his working years, tilled the soil 
in summer and split rocks in winter. But 
by and by some famous man will have inher- 
ited good blood from this farmer, who, in his 
plain village life, was known for his upright- 
ness, his thrift, his intelligence, and his sagac- 
ity. He will be proud of this ancestor, v>diom 
the bad feared and the good honored ; of this 
man, whose nobility of nature gave breadth to 
the narrowness of his calling. Some woman, 
with more than ordinary beauty, may owe it 
to this old man, whose sinews, given early to 
the tuition of nature, grew into symmetrical 
stature ; and whose fresh young features w^ere 
hardened, by care and exposure, into an ex- 
pression of honest and heroic audacity. 

S., the blacksmith, who shod horses by day 
and after nightfall reasoned Avith his neighbors 
in the village store, was a remarkable man. 
He was well-read ; was especially strong in 
history, and an excellent debater. His eyes 
were always bloodshot, and his face was as 
hard lined as . the steel bars upon which he 
wrought; yet, on Sundays, washed clean from 
the smut of toil, it was a face worthy to be 
remembered. Then he was a noble-lookiug 



ETCHINGS. 17 



man, sitting, broad-browed, erect, and observ- 
ant, at the head of his pew, where he fol-' 
lowed Parson B.'s long and sensible discourses 
with the keen relish of an apt logician. This 
blacksmith shod horses admirably. His shoes 
fitted, and his nails never missed. In his 
chosen vocation he had a perfect career, be- 
cause whatever he did he did well. People 
came to him from far and near, for no known 
blacksmith shod horses so well as he. In this 
merit of his work lay the pathos of his life ; for 
this man, who shod horses, might have ruled 
men. The logic which swayed the loungers 
in the village store should have been given to 
his equals. It is a mystery why this stalwart 
wrangler, who might have figured and grown 
famous in the world, hammered away, all his 
da^^s, at horses' feet in a village smithy. 

There is no end to these remembered rep- 
resentative characters ; quaint and positive, 
always grand, because underlaid by simplicity 
and fidelity to right. 

These farmers did not adorn their houses 
much, either in-doors or out, for they were 
almost always work-driven and weary. I*^a- 
ture took up their task where they left it. 
They planted fences and gates and w^ell- 
sweeps. She, with her frosts and stains and 
mosses, tumbled and embellished them. The 



18 NEW ENGLAND BYGONES. 

saplings tliey started grew into prim poplars 
and dense, ill-bearing orchards; but there was 
about these half-worthless trees, in their moss- 
clad old age, a kind of fitness which served its 
time and purpose. "When the square, brown 
farm-houses began to decay, and farmers to 
graft their newly-planted stocks, the poplars 
and shaggy old apple-trees began also to die. 
Each was a sort of appendage to the other, 
and so they passed away together. 

The sweetest and most natural outgrowth 
of old-time pastoral life was a love of, and 
clinging to, the old homesteads. Once 'New 
England w^as full of them; great, brown, roomy, 
homely houses, facing the south ; led to by 
green lanes; shut in by ancestral fields ; stand- 
ing quite even with the greensward, which 
they met with low-lying stones dug out from 
their own pastures. Each had its fiimily 
burial-place, — blessed spot. They were all rich 
in springs and brooks and woodlands. They 
had added to them, year after year, the glory 
of trees and bushes and vines; the wild growth 
of seeds, flung by the winds into the crevices 
of walls and unused places. That which was 
peculiar to them, that which could not be 
simulated by art, w^as a certain beauty given 
to them by time and use and decay, — a sort of 
mellowing into the landscape of the piles and 



ETCHINGS. 19 



their adjuncts, by which each homestead took 
unto itself an individual expression for its owner 
and his descendants. The aspect of a farm- 
house was, to the children of it, as personal 
of recognition as the face of a father or grand- 
father. It was to be held in the family name, 
and go down with it. It was the sanctuary 
of homely virtues ; the centre of family re- 
unions ; the place of its yearly thanksgiving ; 
a spot from w^hich its membership had en- 
larged and diverged; and to which, when they 
died, its sons and daughters were brought 
back for burial. In it, generation after gen- 
eration, there was always one left. It was 
either a faithful son or daughter who had 
married one of her own sort. These men 
and women were spoken of as " the boys 
and girls" at home, and, as such, they were 
most admirable. 'Eo matter how little fitted 
they seemed to be for any other sphere, as 
the appendages and rulers of these old houses 
they could have hardly been changed for the 
better. They were a portion of their appro- 
priate machinery, and stayed by them from 
choice, because their lives had not grown 
away from them. The men had a certain 
audacity of mien ; the simple abandon of per- 
sons whose dealings were largely with nature. 
The women had no artificial ways; little 



20 ^EW ENGLAND BYGONES. 

learning; but much good sense, and their 
greatest charm was that they were easily satis- 
fied with small pleasures. Their children were 
the "■ country cousins" ; as much a sweet fea- 
ture of farm-life as were its dandelions and 
buttercups and daisies. 

Thus, by rotation, the homestead was always 
filled. The foreign land, to which its in- 
dwellers all travelled, was the little burial- 
ground close by. The journey to this was 
short by linear measurement; but, reckoned 
by the events and worth of the days and 
months and years it took to get there, it Avas 
a travel wonderfully rich in effort and results. 
The external signs of this journey were the 
ruts in the boards and stones, worn by the 
steady tramp of feet. What you could not 
see was the life which had been constantly 
diverging from such fountains of piety, truth, 
and industry. 

As I look back, what strikes me most in 
that old country living is its simplicity, its 
earnestness, its honesty, and its dignity. The 
men and women seemed to grapple wdth their 
inherited burdens. They were a race of born 
athletes and wrestlers with the soil ; the natu- 
ral outgrowth of it. 

I see them walking, as they used, across 
the green fields to the meeting-house, which 



ETCHINGS. 21 



stood on a liill a mile away from my grand- 
father's, clad in their long-kept, variously- 
made holiday garments, — a quaint procession. 
There are samples of shawls and dresses, 
preserved by me in memory from the attire 
of my grandfather's fellow-worshippers, every 
thread of whose real texture has been eaten 
away. I know just how they were worn. 
Old Dame H. had a soft, silky, crimson shawl, 
which she drew closely over her shoulders, and 
pinned three times down in front. The pins 
seemed never to vary a thread; and year after 
year her sharp shoulders rubbed at its warp 
and woof until it grew stringy and streaked. 

There were coats and cloaks and dresses, so 
far removed from any suggestion of mode 
that their strangeness of make, joined with 
richness of fabric, gave dignity to them, and 
the men and women who wore them were the 
authors of a true style. 

Old Squire S. never put aside his plaid cloak 
lined with green baize. His sons and daughters 
went away from the homestead, and came back 
richly clad in the world's fashions. That made 
no difference to him. He walked up the church 
aisle, year after year, in front of the gayest of 
them, with his old plaid, which wrapped him 
about like a tartan ; and, through the singing 
of psalms, prayers, and benedictions, he stood, 



22 ^EW ENGLAND BYGONES. 

with tlie green baize flung over his shoulders, 
unconscious that there was anything queer or 
pld-fashioned about him. There was nothing 
old-fashioned. He was a splendid old man, 
erect, proud, with a broad, white brow, and a 
grand record for brain-work in all the courts. 
The old cloak had become a kind of toga, in- 
vested by him with the worth of long associa- 
tion, and so had grown to be invaluably a part 
of himself. 

There is a sentiment about old wraps, which 
have travelled with you, and stood by you when 
the flimsiness of other attire has failed. It 
needs not to be woven in with camel's hair, and 
it does not suit the texture of lace. It is hos- 
tile to fashion, and comes only with using. It is 
tender, and touches you like keepsakes of lost 
friends. Your best imported wraps are those 
which you have brought across the sea your- 
self; which have the imprint of travel and good 
companionship ; which have been tossed about 
in many lands, and had their colors mellowed 
by much usage. Such can never be duplicated 
nor simulated. They are a true tapestry, in- 
wrought with a part of the richness of your life. 
Wliy cannot some web be woven fit for life- 
long wear, so that memory may be allowed to 
crystallize about it, and then the mantles of 
those we have loved could literally fall upon us ? 



CHAPTER 11. 



THE FARM. 



My grandfather built his house in the 
middle of his farm. All the farm-houses in 
that neighborhood were thus centrally located. 
Isolation Avas the result ; so was also economy 
of working force, — no mean item where the 
soil was hard, rocky, and ungrateful, and 
bread was truly to be won by sweat of the 
brow. Distance lent much beauty to these 
plain farm-houses. The long, tree-arched 
green lanes leading to them, their cumbrous 
gates, their straggling sheds, and half-slovenly 
profusion of wood-piles and carts, went into 
the picture ; and the softening aspect of smoke 
and cloud and outlying verdure gave to them 
the baptismal touch of all-creative nature. 

My grandfather's lane was overhung by 
stalwart elms and maples. Just at its en- 
trance was a bubbling spring, whose waters 
trickled down by'^the way-side through beds 
of violets and wild flag. The lane itself was 
fenced in by a stone wall; in my day tum- 
bled by frost and fretted with moss. Its turf 

23 



24 J^^EW ENGLAND BYGONES. 

was like velvet. Two deep wheel-ruts, the 
wear of years, ran through it, in and out of 
which the family chaise bounced rollickingly, 
for horses were sure to prick up their ears 
and quicken their pace as soon as they snuffed 
the cool spring. You know that pleasant 
sound, when, upon turning from the hard 
highway, their hoofs struck the porous soil. 
At the lane's farther end was a gate with a 
huge, upright beam, uncouth, clumsy, and 
slow to move on its hinges, — apt to sag, — 
ploughing a semicircle with its nigh end, and 
weighing heavily upon the shoulder of the 
opener. Endurance seemed to have entered 
into all the building plans of old-time workers; 
and size and weight were to them the emblems 
of endurance. About ni}^ grandfather's gate 
smart-weed and dock-weed and plantain grew 
profusely, — mean weeds; but Hannah, maid- 
of-all-work, distilled from them dyes and 
balsams. Beauty lay hidden in their juices, 
which Hannah expressed and fastened into 
her patiently spun and woven fabrics of 
cotton, linen, and woollen. Over the gate 
and over the well a massive butternut-tree 
ilung its branches. It stands to-day, with its 
trunk half rotten, and I sit under it and seem 
again a child. Only for a moment, for, with 
the years that have gone into my life, some- 



THE FARM. 25 



tiling sweet and beautiful has gone out of it. 
Dear little Benny ! you and I came first to- 
gether through the gateway into the farm- 
house yard. A white-haired old man stood 
in the door to welcome us. It was late on a 
summer's day : so late that the cattle were 
lowing to be let through the pasture-bars; 
the work of the day was w^ellnigh past, and 
the dews and peace of night were beginning 
to fall. Sweet, sacred eventide ! Gone are 
they all, — the dear old man, the beautiful 
boy, the herds, and the laborers who wrought 
with them. The structures, built by mortal 
hands, are rotting and tumbling; the tree is 
dying; the rest are shadowy things of mem- 
ory. I look down into the deep old well, 
with its unsafe curb and sweep (how foolish 
I am !), for the trout little Benny dropped there 
more than forty years ago. I see nothing save 
green, slimy rocks and the shadow of my own 
face. 

I say little Benny, because dead children 
never grow old. "We talk of what they might 
have been, but we possess only what they were. 
Little Benny died more than forty years ago, 
— a beautiful, precocious boy. Had he lived, he 
might have been a famous man. He is only 
remembered as the loving, lovable child, and 
as such I go back to meet him. Very few are 



26 ^EW ENGLAND BYGONES. 

the lasting impressions of the forms and fea- 
tures of lost ones. Some intensity of word or 
look or action glorifies a moment of a child's 
life, and makes its expression an imperishable 
thing of memory. 

Marion, brown-eyed Marion, rosy, radiant, 
flinging back her hair with careless abandon, 
bursts into my room. By that one attitude 
and expression I best remember her. You 
can never know what unwitting posture of 
your child is to become a treasure to you. If 
it dies, you will lose hold of its heart-rending 
reality, and will be consoled by the ideal sug- 
gestiveness of its occasional aspects. This is 
the healing which time, and time alone, brings 
to your sorrows. 

Thus talks the old well to me, treading cau- 
tiously upon its rickety platform. High up 
dangles the rusty bucket-handle ; the balance 
weight is gone ; the sweep and beam are rotten 
and ready to fall. A spasm of tenderness 
seizes me; things take life. Summer days 
come back to me, and with them beautiful 
rural pictures of tired men and patient animals 
slaking their thirst. I shut my eyes and the 
3^ard is alive again. Oxen are lapping cool 
water from the trough ; laborers are grasping 
the dripping bucket, poised on the edge of the 
curb ; upon the doorstep sits my grandfather, 



THE FARM. 27 



his white hair streaming over his shoulders. 
How clear-cut the whole scene is, — this picture 
of common farm-life ! The oxen lift their 
heads and hlink their eyes, and then go back 
to their draught. It seems as if they never 
would be done. The men let down the bucket 
twice and thrice over, and up it comes, each 
time more coolly dripping than before. Its 
crystal streams splash back into the deep old 
well with a pleasant, resonant sound. Hannah 
comes out with her pails and fills them, and I, 
standing on tiptoe, lean over the curb and 
watch the water as it trickles down the mossy 
rocks. She is meanwhile unconscious, as I am, 
that through those simple acts our lives are 
being irrevocably woven together, each with 
the other, as well as with the drinkers and 
drawers around us, in a never-fading picture. 
Dear, cool, overflowing, delightful old well ! 
your waters in those summer days were magic 
waters, and the creatures who drank of you, 
even the dumbest of them, were by you bap- 
tized for me with an undying beauty. 

The heavy farm-gates, though uncouth and 
hard to manage, were made pleasant objects 
by age. The lane-gate of my grandfather, 
hugged by a vine, had put out grasses and 
weeds from its joints, and was mottled all 
over with moss. The make of these gates 



28 NEW ENGLAND BYGONES. 

was always a marvel. Pegs and supple withes 
stood instead of hinges ; and a strong bar, 
fastened to their centre, ran, with a sharp 
angle, to the upper end of a tall post. They 
were in keeping with the well-sweeps, the 
ragged fences, and stone Avails. They grew, 
picturesquely, into the landscape, and pointed 
out otherwise inconspicuous entrance-ways. 
These latter were often only slight wheel-ruts 
cut into the sods of the fields, so that the gate- 
posts served as signboards to benighted and 
weary travellers. They loomed up, gray and 
ghostly, out of the darkness of night, and were 
homely signals of hospitality in winter snow- 
wastes. " I see the gate, — we're almost there !" 
shouted Benny. We were making our first 
joint visit to my grandfather's farm, and the 
friendly bars and beams of this gate beckoned 
to us. Hospitable old gate ! — which would 
never then budge an inch at my tugging ; but 
which nevertheless always swung, with a right 
royal arch, wide open, to let me in. 

A second gate, at my grandfather's, opened 
from the opposite side of the farm-house yard, 
just beyond the butternut-tree, into another 
lane. This lane went down into the pasture 
and the woodland. At its farther end were 
the clumsy, unstable pasture-bars, against 
which the cattle crowded at nightfall, and 



THE FARM. 29 



leaped past the fearless cliildren wlio let tliem 
out. These farmers' children, who roamed 
pastures and woods, unmindful of herds, and 
came back shaggy and weighed down with all 
sorts of wild growth, were truly the foster- 
children of nature. Year after year of their 
half-untamed lives she o:ave to them the sim- 
pie gifts of her annual harvests, and quick- 
ened their senses towards that in her which 
was imperishable. These young freebooters 
laid up enduring riches. Lying on her pas- 
ture-knolls, tossing about amongst her dead 
leaves, tramping through brooks and bogs 
and brushwood, they stumbled upon her 
treasures unawares. The berries and nuts 
and mints they sought were transient things ; 
but the glories of the days which brought 
them entered into, and gave to them a good 
and delight which were eternal. Those chil- 
dren are made richer and better, who have 
early dealings with I^ature ; she gives to them 
a joy which will stand by them all their days. 
If they get it not, they will have missed some- 
thing most admirable out of their lives. 

In farmers' families, the driving of the cows 
to pasture passed by rotation from one child to 
another. Sometimes a man or woman of the 
household took up the task, from necessity or 
inclination, as a duty or diversion. They 



30 ^EW ENGLAND BYGONES. 

were, most often, thoughtful, observant men 
and women, to whom their mornmg and even- 
ing lessons, such as God gave to them in the 
changeful aspects of earth and sky, were, per- 
haps half unconsciously, well learned. Sweet 
scents and sounds and sights greeted them. 
They got from the morning strength for the 
day's burdens, and the peace of twilight lifted 
these burdens from them. I recall three men 
who, all through middle life and far into old 
age, morning and night, at unvarying hours, 
drove their herds to and from the pastures. 
Their cows knew them, and, in the virtue of 
patience, seemed quite as human as they. The;)^ 
were all three grand men, sensible, honest, and 
carrying weight in town affiiirs. This humble 
duty, cheerfully done, did but illustrate and 
embellish the childlike simplicity of their lives. 
There could be no more pastoral picture than 
that of these respectable farmers plodding along 
the highway with their cows in the early bright- 
ness of morning. They were literally walking 
hand in hand with nature. Transplanted into 
a city, they would have been poor in its riches, 
unfitted for its pursuits and pastimes. On 
the country highway they were heirs of the 
soil ; lessees of the landscapes and sky views ; 
unconscious absorbents of the earth's bright- 
ness and beauty. I know men in high places 



THE FARM. 31 



who look back with keen pleasure to their 
cow-driving days, when the lowing herds used 
to come across the rocky pastures to meet 
them, and who, from these enforced morning 
and evening walks, grew to be observers and 
lovers of nature. I remember with delight 
my grandfather's pasture, poor of soil and 
scanty of herbage ; uneven of surface ; its 
hillocks clad with moss and wintergreen ; cut 
in two by a clear, babbling brook; shaded 
here and there by clumps of trees; ragged 
with rocks and ferns and wild shrubs ; marshy 
next to the mill-pond, as well as treacherous, 
and tangled with flag and bulrushes. Kare 
old Rew England pasture-lands ! You were 
stingy of grass, but you were never-failing in 
beauty, — that beauty which was revealed to 
the children, who, next to the herds, were 
your true owners. Early in spring-time, 
against lingering snow-banks, came beds of 
blue and white violets; a little later, hidden 
among crisp, crackling leaves, pink and 
white arbutus, — sweetest of all spring blos- 
soms. Ferns unfolded; mint scented the 
brookside ; coltsfoot brightened its shoal bed ; 
the marsh bristled with spiked leaves. With 
the coming of summer, the water-soaked and 
porous soil by degrees dried up. One had 
no longer to pick his way from stone to 



32 J^EW ENGLAND BYGONES. 

stone across boggy places (what early pasture 
roamer does not recall the overrated audacity 
of such passages ?) ; ferns grew strong and deep- 
colored ; bog onions curled their brown coils 
against the rocks (they would not pull now 
with the old relish) ; weeds and shrubs and 
stinted trees took on the gifts of the passing 
seasons, and, as you trod on them or brushed 
by them, sent out to you their wild flavors. 
Close by the mill-pond the soil was always 
soft, and marked by the hoof-prints of cattle. 
Here the pond was shoal and full of lilies. 
On hot summer days the tired animals would 
stand for hours knee-deep in the sluggish 
water, unconscious pictures of peaceful pas- 
toral life. Their crooked trail, winding in 
and out through the dampest and shadiest 
portion of the pasture-land, had a friendly 
look. Its black line was easy to be traced far 
into the evening, and was always a pleasant 
thing to stumble upon. It has guided many a 
wanderer home. What traveller has not had 
his heart gladdened by footprints in waste 
places ? My path was treacherous and hard to 
follow, but it led one down through tall, sweet- 
scented bushes; across the shoal brook; over a 
long stretch of ferns ; past rocks and crackling 
brushwood, into the alders and bulrushes and 
wild flag, outside of which were the shoal 



THE FARM. 33 



water and a lily-bed, where, stuck fast in the 
mud, was a rotting old boat, which the waves 
lapped lazily. 

Here the children from far and near used to 
come for lilies, pushing with poles out into the 
pond. One summer day, at nightfall, a little 
girl was missing from a farmer's house. She 
had gone out in the morning and had not come 
back. Two weeks went by and no clue of her 
was found. Meanwhile the budded lilies blos- 
somed on the pond, and other children went 
one day in search of them. They came back, 
not lily-laden, but with a great horror on their 
lips. Pushing about among the pads, they 
had come upon something which they dared 
not touch; something which two weeks be- 
fore was fairer than any lily, but which now 
was an awful thing, to be hastily put out of 
sight. 

On this shore the children used to plait rush 
caps and play with flag-leaves in mimic war- 
fare. The black, soggy soil was honeycombed 
by their busy feet, and their constant com- 
panions were the cattle, who cooled themselves 
in the shoal edge of the pond. The blue of 
the distant hills, the sunshine, the shimmer of 
the pond, the verdure of forest and wood- 
land and lowland and upland overarched and 
surrounded and hemmed them in. Absorbed 



34 ^EW ENGLAND BYGONES. 

thus by the landscape, they were made transient 
features of its glory. 

When the summer had passed, grasses 
bloomed, with a faint purple haze, on the up- 
lands, and bushes . flaunted in crimson, fore- 
runners of the dying of the year. Rare pas- 
toral scenes ! Again I am watching the shadows 
of ancient pines, lying across the pond ; herds 
browse the hillocks ; I see the daintily coiling 
smoke of distant farm-houses ; the coquetting 
of clouds and sunshine ; the noble framework 
of hill and forest. The old music comes back, — 
the ring of the woodman's axe ; the whiz of 
the mill under the hill ; the lowing of herds ; 
bird-song; insect-hum; and, above all, the 
drowsy lapping of the pond against its shore. 
Behold the beauty, the plenty, the generosity 
of my pasture ! 

What shall be said of the woodland, grand, 
solemn old woodland, with its pines, grim, and 
ragged with time ; full of pallid ferns and 
such dainty blossoms as love dark places; 
tangled with a wild undergrowth, and ankle- 
deep with the crackling waste of past years ? 
Dense, damp, dark, stately old woodland, — I 
love all pines because of my early friendship 
with yours. Lying on the mouldy carpet of 
your waste verdure, I caught your whispers 
with the hidden sources of your growth, and 



THE FARM. 35 



watcliecl you from my cliamber-window as 
weird and wild you battled with storms. The 
whistlino^ of a fierce winter's wind throuo:li a 

o o 

forest of pines is a mournful sound ; it seems 
like a prolonged wail of the persecuted trees. 
ISTo tree has a more strikino; mission than the 
pine. It is the vanguard tree of nature. 
Grand, erect, beautiful, it enriches the low, 
sandy plain ; climbing, strong and aggressive, 
ever climbing, it lies prone against the moun- 
tain-side, clothing it with eternal verdure. 
There is something pathetic in the wild ges- 
ticulations of these brave trees, flinging out 
their stinted and shrunken arm-like branches 
in defiance to the winds ; stretching them back 
from the mountain-sides towards the valleys, 
until, planted among the clouds, they wax 
frigid and dumb and dead. 



CHAPTER III. 

THE FAEM-HOUSE. 

Back through the green lane again to the old 
farm-house. I gently push open a door which 
leads into a hall, wherein I have sported away 
many a day in childhood. At the other end 
of this hall is another door, through which 
came, forty years ago, the odor of sweet-Jbrier 
and honeysuckle. I tiptoe across the fragile 
floor and look out. Field-scents greet me, so 
familiar that I am almost dazed into believing 
that many things have not been, and that the 
dear old days have come back. Once a bench 
and basin stood beside this door, where tired 
laborers used to make themselves tidy for their 
meals. Just beyond was a kitchen-garden, with 
a beehive close by, and a grindstone under a 
maple. Bench and basin, hive and stone are 
gone, and burdocks and plantain have taken 
the place of homely vegetables ; but the sap- 
ling little Benny planted has grown into a 
massive tree. Who would have thought to 
have tracked him after a lapse of more than 
forty years ? Is this not a true spirit com- 

36 



THE FARM-HOUSE. 37 

munion, — tliis catching glimpses, among the 
shadows of the long past, of dear faces 
which have not grown old ; this wistful turn- 
ing back towards the sunshine of our earlier 
days ? 

My grandfather's kitchen was a sombre 
room, ceiled and painted brown ; w^itli huge 
beams, high dressers, and yawning fireplace. 
It had only two small windows, and was en- 
tered by nine doors. It w^as in reality the 
great hall of the house. What it lacked by 
day was light and sunshine. At night, bright- 
ened by a roaring backlog, it was full of cheer. 
Then its beams and ceilings and simple fur- 
nishings were enriched by shadows, and the 
pewter dishes upon its brown dressers shone in 
dancing firelight like silver. The two shelves, 
full of leather-covered books ; the weatherw^ise 
almanac, hanging from a peg ; the cross-legged 
table and prim chairs ; the long crane, with 
its hissing teakettle ; the brush ; the bellows ; 
the settle in the corner, and whatever else was 
there, all became fire-changed, and were mel- 
lowed into the brio^ht scene. This room was 
by night the best part of the house. It was 
always the true heart of it; that vital centre 
from which diver o^ed its indwellino- life. It 
was the place where people lounged and lin- 
gered. Because its small windows let in few 



38 ^EW ENGLAND BYGONES. 

sunbeams, tliose wliicli did come in were all 
the more precious. Because it was full of 
homely things, and was, as the women said, 
" most convenient," it had inwrought into it, 
as a picture, a quaint beauty of adaptation. 
Mellow, brown old kitchens, — how many costly 
rooms simulate, in their furnishings, your in- 
expensive colors ! 

There was a dignity in the domestic labor 
of my grandfather's kitchen. Its workers 
wrested from the humility of their vocation 
some measure of that beauty which would 
have been thrust upon them by more gracious 
conditions of life. Their daily walk was nar- 
row : it was almost bounded by their kitchen ; 
but this latter was glorified by firelight and 
consecrated by use. The simple harmony of 
it, which has made it a charming thing of 
memory, was reflected upon these women. 
They became a part of it, and, as such, they 
are not drudges in plain garments, but quaintly- 
costumed life-studies in a picture of a delight- 
ful old room. 

I can see now my stately grandmother pre- 
paring her noontide meal. Her checked 
apron and muslin cap were spotlessly clean, 
and she handled her clumsy utensils with a be- 
coming deftness. Hannah, the maid, hovered 
around, ready to lend a helping hand. The 



THE FARM-HOUSE. 39 

crane, hung witli pots, kept up a constant siz- 
zling, and covered pans spluttered from ember- 
heaps in the corner. There was no hurry, no 
bustle, no rattling of dishes. Hannah blew 
a tin horn from the back-door. There was a 
swashing at the little bench outside. The 
crane was swung out ; covers were lifted ; 
pans were taken from the corners ; with per- 
fect order the dinner passed from the fire to 
the table, well cooked, sufficient, and whole- 
some. It was not daintily served, with cut- 
glass and china, but it was full of the essence 
of vitality, and had the merit of utter cleanli- 
ness. My grandmother presided over it with 
a serious dignity untaught by rules of eti- 
quette ; and in no way was the discipline of 
her household better shown than by the utter 
decorum of its meals. 

The kitchen floor was white and worn with 
much scrubbing, — hollows telling where its 
best seats by the hearth were. The doors 
opened into rare rooms : this one into a 
granite-walled dairy, as cool, clean, and com- 
pact as if it were cut from the solid rock. 
The next led into the cellar, full of compart- 
ments and bins and dark closets, crammed in 
winter with farm products. This storehouse 
never failed. Its apples were wild things, but 
toothsome, for they were the best from a great 



40 ^EW ENGLAND BYGONES. 

orchard, and one scented them from the stair- 
way out of a long line of barrels. Nothing 
can quite equal for richness the flavor which a 
year's ripeness pours into a farm-house. It 
is only found in country homes, — this con- 
densed sweetness, which has gone out of all 
the months of the year into the fashioning 
of the many things which were heaped and 
hoarded at the gathering in of the harvest. 

How fruits stored in old cellars kept their 
freshness ! That of one apple-tree in particu- 
lar, at my grandfather's, never got its true 
ripeness until late in April. When fii-st har- 
vested it was crabbed, puckering the mouth. 
It was a tiny, bright fruit, profusely mottling 
its tree with crimson. It shrank and withered 
by keeping ; but it grew palatable in inverse 
ratio to its size. I remember a branch, broken 
off by accident, which carried its relish into 
the days of June. It was a pretty thing, hang- 
ing from the cellar-wall, — a hardy waif from 
the dead harvest of the past year. 

Two doors led into bedrooms, in which 
were chests of drawers full of homespun linen. 
Over the dairy ran the stairway, leading to 
chambers severely simple in furnishing, but 
clean, and made bright by sunshine. The 
floors of these chambers were kept strewn with 
sand, — a cheap, changeful covering, which 



THE FARM-HOUSE. 41 

at night I used to scrawl over with skeleton 
pictures, to be scattered in the morning-. 

The doors mostly opened with iron latches. 
These latches were clumsy things, lifting by 
a thumb-piece with a sharp click, and send- 
ing a shiver through one on frosty days. On 
the shed doors, made of wood, they were 
drawn up by the traditional bobbin. Brass 
knobs adorned the doors of the spare room. 
These were kept polished, and were held in 
high esteem. Their machinery, shut into a 
clumsy iron case, was screwed upon the out- 
side of the door. As works of art none of 
these fastenings were much to be commended, 
but as quaint appendages to their homely doors 
were the best latches I have ever known. 

The west room was the family " keeping- 
room," also lighted up at night by a roaring 
backlog. The brush and bellows in this 
room were pretentious with green and gold, 
and the shovel and poker were headed with 
brass knobs ; but the fire was not a whit 
more cheerful than that in the brown kitchen. 

I have sat hour after hour in that kitchen 
watching the backlog's slow consumption, 
half blinding my eyes with its flickering 
brightness. It was a long-dying, companion- 
able thing, taking strong hold upon a child's 
fancy. It had been dragged to its place in 



42 NEW ENGLAND BYGONES. 

the early morning, snow-bound and sliaggy. 
It was defiant of its fate, and fought against 
it through the whole day. It' truly died by 
inches. From its ends sizzled and dropped 
its sap, — its true life-blood ; its substance fell 
off ring by ring; its ashes settled slowly upon 
the hearth. Everybody hacked at it; it was 
constantly plied with shovel, tongs, and poker; 
sparks flew furiously ; coals flaked off; by de- 
grees the log grew thin in the middle. At 
last a solid blow finished it ; it snapped, and 
the parted ends fell without the iron dogs ; 
the brands were ready to be raked up ; the 
backlog was no more. Its life was jocund 
and brilliant. It was eloquent with fiery 
tongues, and the stories it told to a child, 
with crackling voice, went not out with its 
smoke. 

Farmers were not stingy with their fuel, for 
the brush in the woodlands grew faster than 
they could burn the ancient trees. My grand- 
father's backlogs were drawn through the 
house on a hand-sled, — snowy, mossy things, 
dripping with sap and shaggy with bark. 
They were buried in embers, and then sup- 
plemented with a forelog, which, in its own 
turn, was plied with lighter fuel and bolstered 
up with iron dogs. The building of this pile 
was an art; and the practical farmer knew 



THE FARM-HOUSE. 43 

how to adjust the size of the log to the day's 
consumption, so that it was quite sure to 
shatter and break in season for the early 
" raking up" of the night. This " raking up" 
at my grandfather's was his own care ; and it 
was thought worthy of note in an alm^anac 
when, once upon a time, his coals had failed 
to keep, and a fresh supply was brought from 
a neighbor's half a mile away. The ashes of 
those ancient wood-fires were full of virtue. 
They went to leach in spring for the making 
of family soap, and spread their richness far 
and wide over hungry fields. 

The west room of the old farm-house was 
most cheerful in long winter evenings ; not 
made so by social life or by artificial adorn- 
ments, but rather by a sweet peace, and by 
the rich gifts of its outlying world. With 
face flattened against its window-panes, I, a 
nature-loving child, peered out at the glitter- 
ing mill-pond and the dark woodland ; traced 
the thread of a highway ; caught the sound of 
transient bells ; made friends w^ith snow and 
clouds and shadows, and came to love its wild 
winter scenery. Without a love for nature 
life in this isolated farm-house, through the 
winter months, to one unused to it, must have 
been lonely and monotonous. In February, 
when the lane almost daily filled with snow. 



44 ^^W ENGLAND BYGONES. 

my grandfatlier opened a highway through 
the " upper field." This was more easily kept 
clear, but it failed to entice many comers. 
People hugged their firesides through winter 
snows, and learned to be content. There 
was a largeness about the home-life of ancient 
well-to-do country people. They had space, 
great houses, and great rooms; and if they 
had little show, they had at least no shams. 
Their houses needed few furnishings, because 
so much embellishment was given to them by 
nature. Through many years, vivid and beau- 
tiful, have stood by me the rare adornments 
of my grandfather's great house. They were 
skies and woods and water and far-off hills let 
in through its windows; the shifting aspects 
of winter snows and summer verdure ; and 
many especial revelations from earth and sky. 
It was a great house, so large that its uncar- 
peted chambers gave back an echo to my foot- 
steps; and I never went up to its garret, which 
I did seldom and softly, without a feeling of 
loneliness. This garret was a weird place, 
with shelves and scaffolds packed with the 
waste of years, and its beams hung with dried 
herbs. It was dimly lighted by two small 
gable windows, and at the head of the stair- 
way was cut in two by a rambling old chimney. 
More than any other spot in the house it had 



THE FARM-HOUSE. 45 

the air of age and decay. Its dealings appeared 
to be wholly with the past, and things out of 
which life had gone. All that was in it looked 
as if it had belonged to another century ; and 
herbs filled the air with a sickish, musty smell. 
It was so far away from the living-rooms that 
few sounds of busy in-door life ever reached it. 
It was a gray ghost of a chamber, in which 
nobody had ever lived ; a sort of burial-place 
for worn-out and faded things. It was delight- 
ful to come down from it into the brighter 
rooms, which seemed, all of them, to be per- 
vaded by some savory odor. Dried lavender 
and rose-leaves sent out their scents from 
chests and drawers ; the dairy, the cellar, the 
cheese-room had each their own flavor; and 
the best essence of every edible seemed to dis- 
engage itself over the open fire. Johnny-cakes 
baked in the corner ; pies cooked in the oven ; 
meat roasted on the spit; potatoes boiled in 
pots ; and from them all into the room came 
appetizing steams. 

The old folks talked but little in winter 
evenings. My grandmother's knitting-work 
dropped stitches now and then, which she 
drowsily picked up with an "Oh, dear suz!" 
My grandfather, sitting opposite to her, by 
one corner of the hearth, dozed, with the 
ruddy firelight mocking at his wrinkles. 



46 NEW ENGLAND BYGONES. 

Across tliem both, on tlie chest of drawers, 
on the bed-curtains, on the tall clock, on the 
white walls, danced this same firelight; ont 
through the small panes it streamed over 
the waste of snow into the highway, cheer- 
ing the cold traveller ; bright, beautiful home- 
light. Peaceful, long-seeming, dreamy winter 
evenings, you made one used to the sighing 
of winds, the roaring of storms, the cold glit- 
ter of snow; and you taught one, through 
isolation, to find how much there is that is 
beautiful and satisfying to be gotten out of 
the roughest aspects and moods of nature ; you 
also taught how simple may be the resources 
of a true home-life. 

The door on the other side of the front 
entry opened into the east room. This was 
the " best room," or, as my grandfather called 
it, the " fore" room. Most noticeable of its 
furnishing was the bed, — more for show than 
use. It was a tall structure, built up of corn- 
husks and feathers, not to be leaned against 
or carelessly indented. Its blue and white 
checked canopy, edged with knotted fringe, 
suspended by hooks from the ceiling, was 
spun and dyed and woven by the women of 
the household. Every piece of linen they 
used was of their own make. A pillow-case 
from that house is marked in plain letters 



THE FARM-HOUSE. 47 

A. D., meaning Abigail Drake, who spun and 
wove it there more than eighty years ago. 
The letters are stitched in with yellow silk 
(it must once have been black) after an ancient 
sampler. This sampler was a curious thing, 
running through the alphabet and numerals 
in several texts and various-colored silks, 
punctuated at the end by two skeleton birds, 
and winding up with this wise maxim, " In- 
dustry is its own reward." It also announced 
in written text that Abigail Drake, at the 
age of twelve, in such a year, wrought this 
sampler. 

Such samplers were worked by girls in the 
village schools. Their letters were pricked in 
and out w^ith extreme care, and the best exe- 
cuted of them were generally framed and hung 
in the fore room. They were as precious to 
those who made them as if they had been rare 
water-colors, and the measure of a young 
woman's accomplishment was taken from the 
skill with which she had done this task. As 
rags, these old samplers are worthless now ; 
as the faded work of bright young girls of a 
past century, they interest one ; for they are 
fabrics into which, in long ago summer days, 
were inwrought some of the old-fashioned 
simplicity and patience and industry of a dead 
generation. 



48 NEW ENGLAND BYGONES. 



My grandfather's flax was of good grain. 
Its bed was just inside of the pasture-bars, 
making a dainty show of blue blossoms. 
There could be nothing prettier in the way 
of flowers than it was. Waving in the wind, 
it seemed like a bit of summer sky let down. 
It was tended with great care, and harvested 
and made ready for use with much labor. 
Failure of the crop by untoward weather, 
or any mishap in its preparation, was looked 
upon as a great misfortune. 

In long summer afternoons my grandmother 
and Hannah planted their little wheels by the 
back-door, and hour after hour drew out the 
pliant threads which were to be woven, in the 
loom up-stairs, into variously patterned cover- 
lets, table-cloths, and towels. One is touched 
in handling, at this remote day, the fabrics 
fashioned by these ancient women. It seems 
as if they had woven into them a warp and 
woof of their own vitality, and that the 
strength which went out of the patient work- 
ers entered into their webs, and gave to them 
a texture of beauty and endurance. This old 
farm-house pillow-case of mine is as firm as 
if its fibre had been plucked from the flax- 
bed but yesterday, and it is as lustrous as it 
was Avhen the fingers which wove it first cut 
it from the beam. To nothing does the past 



/ 



THE FARM-HOUSE. 49 

cling more than to such ancient cloths. The 
threads you handle, which moth and mildew 
have marred, are not the real thing ; that is 
a finer undershot, impalpable to touch of 
stranger, but trailing down to you, like silken 
folds, glittering and precious with tenderest 
memories. 

How many operations of breaking and 
bleaching and boiling those home products 
had to go through before they came out at 
last faultless as the fruits of foreio;n looms ! 
The bureau, in the fore room, was always 
crammed with fine twined linens, white as 
snow, and scented with lavender and rose- 
leaves. How did those women accomplish so 
much ? I look back upon them with pride 
and wonder; for my grandmother was no 
drudge : she was a true lady. Never was 
there a more dignified or better bred woman 
than she; never the mistress of a more well- 
ordered household. She was never hurried, 
never behindhand with her work; was given 
to hospitality, and was tasteful in her dress. 
Very few, in those days, were the complica- 
tions of daily living; still I marvel how my 
grandmother managed to be so cultivated and 
so elegant, and yet sit, hour after hour, at the 
loom, plying her shuttle with no less persistence 
than, in spinning, she drew out her threads. 



5 NE W ENGL A ND B YG ONES. 

Across the huge beams, under and over 
each other, crossed and recrossed these threads, 
like a spider's web. I know by what manifold 
toil they were gotten there : by reeling, sizing, 
spooling, and warping, before my grandmother 
could beo:in to throw her shuttle. The work 
was slow, but it never flagged. Threads were 
broken and carefully taken up; quills gave 
out, and were patiently renewed; the web 
grew, thread by thread, inch by inch; the 
intricate pattern came out upon the surface, 
and pleased the weaver's eye; neighbors 
dropped in and gossiped over and about 
it. The days wore on; the worker never 
failed at her beam; until, most likely at the 
close of some long summer's afternoon, the 
end of the warp was reached; the treadles 
stopped; the web was done. How delighted 
the women used to be with their woven fabric, 
so slowly constructed, so quickly unwound ! 
They stretched it out, clipped its hanging 
threads, held it up to the light, and stroked 
and caressed it as if it were a living thing. 
It would have been a mean web indeed had 
it brought them no high satisfaction. It may 
have been that spinning and weaving, by long 
practice, grew to be a sort of unconscious me- 
chanical process ; that the w^orkers, in their 
long hours of monotonous employment, were 



THE FABM-HOUSE. 51 

given to meditation; and thus, from their 
double vocation, came perhaps that air of 
serious dignity common among the better 
class of farm-house women. 

N^o thing could be more picturesque or 
prettier, in country life, than the little flax- 
wheel, with well-filled distaff, being plied in 
a shady doorway by comely matron or rosy 
lass. The loom, with its web and weaver, 
made a classic picture ; and its continuous 
thud, sounding hour after hour from an upper 
room, was a symbol of that pathetic patience 
which entered so largely into the lives of 
working women. 

The fore room was seldom used. It was 
rather a store-room for household treasures ; 
for such things as had been bought with hard- 
earned money were highly prized by these 
simple people. Its furniture was the costliest 
and most modern, as well as the ugliest, in the 
house. It was a sort of show-room. The 
china and glass in its cupboard were marvel- 
lously fine, and have come down as heir- 
looms. They are suggestive of the tendencies 
and tastes of women, who are traditionally 
most charming, through simplicity, because, 
from the force of their condition, their lives 
could not be otherwise than simple. Their 
merit, therefore, is not so much in the fact 



52 ^JSW ENGLAND B YG ONES. 

that tliey lived so near nature, which they 
could not help doing, — ^that they took to 
themselves a beauty of which they knew 
not, — as that, while possessing the common 
instincts of woman, they bore burdens with 
heroic patience, and, through long, hard- 
worked lives, kept up a holiday simulation 
of that ease and luxury which was not their 
own. 

A narrow flight of stairs led, from the front 
entry, up to the guest-chambers. One of them 
was haunted. The ghost of this ro/)m was a 
harmless thing. A child of the house. Oily 
by name, had been found crushed in the wood- 
land by a fallen tree. It was so long ago that 
his little grave had sunk far below its fellows ; 
yet his memory had been kept fresher than 
the turf above it by the legend of this east 
chamber. Its furnishings were quaint and 
homely : a huge oaken chest of drawers, rush- 
bottomed chairs, and a low bedstead hung with 
checked brown and white linen. Between 
the two front windows was a looking-glass in 
a queer little frame, with a silhouette picture 
of m}^ grandfather and grandmother on either 
side of it. In a cupboard by the chimney 
was a set of fine china, painted in flowing 
blue. 

In through its windows came the eternal, 



THE FARM-HOUSE. 53 



ever-shifting glory of the outlying landscape. 
As I looked out of these windows on summer 
mornings, my heart grew full, like a heart 
touched by love, so profuse in variety and 
beauty was the scenery of this wild, lonely 
spot. 



CHAPTER lY. 

SPRING-TIME AND HAYING. 

There is no end to the coquetry of a J^ew 
England spring. Some early March morning 
you look out upon a waste of snow. You are 
weary of it ; you long to see life and growth 
and verdure come into the dead landscape. 
Old winter flings back against the pane scuds 
of snow and sleet. Then come dark days, 
clinging mists and warm rains, trying to pa- 
tience and evil for invalids. Little water chan- 
nels, with a melancholy gurgle, undermine the 
snow-banks. There is everywhere a gradual 
subsidence of surface. Tops of tall rocks peep 
out; highways get to be wellnigh impassable ; 
cellars grow wet; brooks begin to roar and 
rivers to rise ; there is a universal sizzling 
and steaming. This grizzly, dispiriting com- 
motion is the birth-throe of spring. Shortly 
the mossy housetops begin to smoke ; the 
fields and pastures are full of bare knolls 
and patches ; fences, which have been winter- 
buried, once more zigzag through the land- 
scape, and dark lines mark the lanes and high- 

54 



SPRING-TIME AND HAYING. 55 

ways. Leaf-buds swell, and the frosts of the 
night melt before the morning sunshine. Lit- 
tle boys trundle their sap-buckets through the 
pastures, and you see that the yearly marvel of 
verdure is being inwrought into the branches 
and twigs of the bare forests. Another season 
of seed-time and harvest will be born unto 
you. ^ 

Chimney corners are deserted ; farmers be- 
gin to bestir themselves. They sort over their 
seeds, put in repair their farm utensils, and, 
before they get fully harnessed to their out-of- 
door work, attend to their town affairs. "What 
country-bred boy or girl does not remember 
that yearly meeting, when all the voters of 
the town swarmed about its great, bare hall, 
and cast into the ballot-box those tickets the 
making up of which had cost months of logic 
in the village stores and much hard feeling 
among honest neighbors ? All the children 
were politicians that day ; and the moderator, 
generally chosen for bis loud voice, was as dis- 
tinguished to them as if he had been made 
President of the whole republic. The elective 
process was a slow one; often so hotly con- 
tested that the count for representative to Gen- 
eral Court was hardly reached at nightfall. 
The little boys who peddled molasses candy 
(most of it badly burned) gave out the bulletins 



56 ^EW ENGLAND BYGONES. 

of its progress. The slumpy drifts had to be 
cut down beforehand to make the roads passa- 
ble, over which, when their votes were needed, 
the feeble old men were taken at the expense 
of their party. The breaking up of the meet- 
ing w^as shown, to waiting housewives, by 
the thickening on the highway of returning 
farmers, most of them laden with budgets of 
gingerbread and candy. The women were as 
anxious for news as if there had been a great 
battle, and the zest of the day, to the chil- 
dren, was only surpassed by that of the annual 
muster. 

This muster, or " training day," as it w^as 
more often called, was their best holiday, when 
the militia was drilled in a vacant lot of some 
fortunate town. What child ever forgot that 
show when once seen ? As an early experience 
or a remembered picture, what could surpass 
it? How^ real the soldiers were with their 
muskets and bright uniforms ! What a great 
man the captain was ! And the drum-major, 
who ever saw his like ? What a marvel of dis- 
cipline the soldiers showed ! what uniformity 
of step ! what skill in evolution ! wdiat success 
of officers in horsemanship ! All day long 
they went through their drills, and the gaping 
crowd stared and marvelled, half taking this 
play for a real thing and these men for true 



SPRING-TIME AND HAYING. 57 

soldiers. Before daylight, from the country 
miles around, wagons full of living freight be- 
gan to pour into the field, until it was half 
packed with sight-seers. These wagons were 
drawn close up by the wall as a safe place for 
the girls and younger children. The unhar- 
nessed horses, to be kept quiet with hay, were 
tied close by, and the larger boys got astride 
the wall or climbed into neighboring trees. 
Booths were put up, and pedlers' carts stood 
thick in an inner ring. Gingerbread and 
candy were the staple articles of trade, with 
such bright gauds as would be likely to catch 
an uncritical eye. It was the custom for lasses 
to receive presents on this day, and because of 
this many a hard-earned penny was foolishly 
spent. It was amusing to see the plain farmers 
going about with their red bandanna handker- 
chiefs (show things) full of gingerbread, the 
extent of their day's dissipation. It was good 
gingerbread, with a sort of training flavor, 
which died out with the giving up of the cus- 
tom of the day. At noon, when the soldiers 
dispersed for dinner, the most adventurous 
boys followed the great officers to the tavern, 
and looked in at the windows to see them eat, 
whispering to each other of the prowess of 
these dangerous men. It was not considered 
respectable for young girls to wander about 

5 



58 NEW ENGLAND BYGONES. 

among the crowd, so they lunched in the 
wagons, or on the greensward by them, and 
their nooning was the harvest of the dealers 
in gingerbread. 

The climax of the drill was the firing off of 
the guns, which brought many an urchin down 
from his perch as quickly as if he had been 
shot in the head. Unbred horses did not 
relish the day, and were constantly making 
little side stampedes, no less exciting than the 
drill itself. A shower took all the feather 
and glory out of the show, and sent soldiers 
flying in front of the crowd. Before nightfall 
parties got mixed. Soldiers mistook them- 
selves for citizens, and citizens forgot the defer- 
ence due to soldiers. It was generally grow- 
ing to be truly warlike, when at order of the 
great captain the trainers, led by music of 
bugle and drum, marched magnificently from 
the field. The crowd waited. Men, women, 
and children seemed to devour with their eyes 
this departing glory ; this toy pageant, which 
had given them a merry day ; this mock sol- 
diery, which had simulated patriotic virtue ; 
this thing, which was not foolish because it 
was so real to them. When it had fairly passed 
out of sight each went his and her own way, 
and, almost before the drum had stopped play- 
ing its marching tune, the field was deserted. 



SPRING-TIME AND HAYING. 59 

By the first of May morning sunshine begins 
to have power, and through your windows 
comes the gladsome gush of spring birds. The 
buried life of nature has burst its cerements ; 
the earth is mellowing ; trees are leaving, and 
sods are waiting to be turned. Here and there, 
under the shady side of fences or on distant 
hill-tops, lie strips of dingy snow. You do not 
mind them, for your feet walk over crisp 
mosses and tender grass ; you rustle aside last 
year's perished leaves for arbutus, and close 
beside these same snow-strips you find violets. 
Anon the landscape grows picturesque with 
the blue frocks and red shirts of farm laborers, 
with ploughs and bonfires and oxen and chil- 
dren and slowly-moving carts. 

To the farmer there seems to be no end to 
spring labor. Sowing and planting over, the 
upspringing seed is to be carefully watched 
and tended. Each day brings its weight of 
ever-varying cares. The IN^ew England farmer 
of moderate means truly gets his bread by the 
sweat of his brow. The vegetables and grains, 
which make up so large a portion of his fare, 
are raised by dint of prudent forecast, and the 
bringing to bear of much practical philosophy 
upon stingy soil. In the spring, my grand- 
father and his one man-servant, with an occa- 
sional day of foreign help, were equal to the 



60 ^EW ENGL A ND B YG ONES. 

work of the farm. But in hajing-time, tlirice 
a day, a score or more of stout-limbed laborers 
gathered around my grandfather's board, and 
the cupboard in the brown kitchen groaned 
under its weight of hearty viands. Sudden 
showers brought over willing neighbors, and 
now and then a traveller would stop a day or 
two to lend 'a helping hand. My grandmother 
held these " transients" in low esteem. 

These old !N^ew England farmers were apt 
to be " close" with their money. Who could 
blame them if they were ? The gain^ of most 
of them came by slow accretions, and their 
lives were at warfare with the elements. They 
were generous in personal service, and where 
they would grudgingly give you a penny, they 
did not hesitate to use their strength for you. 
They were watchful to help with your exposed 
harvest, and they pitched and pulled and tugged 
and sweat for you without thought of reward. 
They were a well-informed class. Seen plant- 
ing and hoeing their corn and potatoes, in 
dusty and uncouth attire, they seemed like 
patient animals. In talking with them one 
was astonished at their intelligence, begotten 
of their application and their dealings with 
nature. They had been well taught geography, 
grammar, and arithmetic. If a broad provin- 
cialism marred their speech, it was not because 



SPRING-TIME AND HAYING. 61 



they knew little of the construction of lan- 
guage. They were apt with rules, and were 
better versed in the laws, which ought to have 
moulded their words, than many men and 
women of politer tongue. They were learned 
in whatever pertained to their craft, only that 
their knowledge was marred by a certain ob- 
stinate credulity. Students of almanacs, they 
became weatherwise from watching the clouds. 
Clinging to the traditions of their fathers, they 
were still not unskilful chemists for the soils 
which made up their own farms. They learned 
from practice the right rotation of crops, and 
thriftily turned their farm-waste into food for 
their fields. They cared little for trees or 
shrubs or flowers, but readily fenced out for 
the housewife a sunny garden-patch. Weeds 
infested their fields and marred their crops ; 
children trampled down their grass ; thieving 
birds pecked at their corn and grain. They 
were a much-tried race, w^ith sun and wind as 
often working them ill as good, yet they kept 
their courage and tempers marvellously well. 
Rough, with an undercurrent of softness ; not 
cultivated yet wise ; nursed by nature and led 
by Bible precepts ; above all they pleased you 
by the healthy content with which they ac- 
cepted their condition. 

In winter, sitting on wooden benches by the 



62 NEW ENGLAND BYGONES. 

stoves of country stores, they used to discourse 
and take counsel together. They much loved 
discussion, and party spirit ran high. Af- 
fairs of town and State and nation were 
handled with rude but close logic. These 
stores were queer places, full of all sorts of 
commodities, smelling strong of codfish, mo- 
lasses, and snuff, and too often of l^ew Eng- 
land rum. In long summer afternoons the 
humbler class of farmers' wives went to them 
to exchange dairy products for dry goods and 
groceries. A fresh supply of " storekeepers' " 
wares made a great stir. The women over- 
looked and talked about the meagre stock, and 
strung washed samples of its calicoes upon 
their windows-sills to dry. They used to go 
past my grandfather's, to the store beyond the 
miller's red cottage, with wooden boxes tied 
up in squares of white cotton. These were 
full of butter. The more opulent of them 
drove clumsy wagons filled with various farm 
products good for barter. 

Simple shoppers, but makers of rare bar- 
gains, inasmuch as the stuffs you bought 
brought you solid comfort and true delight. 
They washed well and wore well, and the 
silk and sheen, which were not in their real 
texture, were imparted to them by the satisfac- 
tion which you had in them. Country maideng 



SPRING-TIME AND HAYING. 63 

fitted their calicoes with care, and wore them 
with exquisite neatness. If they overrated 
the fineness, the dyes and the becomingness of 
the fabrics, it was because their color blind- 
ness and their worldly ignorance helped them 
to be made satisfied and happy by very little 
things. They were as acceptable to each other 
and to their sweethearts in calico as they 
would have been, fashion taught, in silks and 
laces. 

The candies of these stores were the delight 
of children. The red and white hearts shut 
up in dingy, brass-mouthed jars were in reality 
stale, but to the buyers of them the freshness 
which they lacked was given to them by their 
rarity. 

The keepers of the stores, having leisure, 
were apt to be men of much intelligence. I 
found one of them, on an August day, sitting 
just outside his shop, his- chair tilted back 
against the wall, so wrapped up in a transla- 
tion of Homer's Iliad that he had no ear for 
a bargain. His recreation only illustrated, 
what is ever true of country life, that it holds 
in silence and humility many thinkers. This 
store was perched upon a hill, in an out-of-the- 
way place. All the inhabitants of the little 
village seemed to be either at work or play in 
its adjoining fields. He sat there alone, an 



64 NEW ENGLAND BYGONES. 

old man, tall, massive, wliite-liaired, Ms face 
beneficent with the peace of an untroubled 
life. He peered from over his iron-bound 
spectacles, keeping his place in his book with 
his forefinger, and answered my questions in 
an abstracted way, as if I were a bother to 
him. He was a beautiful picture of a vigor- 
ous happy old age. The pomps and vanities 
and vexations of society were nothing to him, 
and yet he was consorting with the best; and 
the glory of intellect and of age, and the bright 
splendor of the summer's day, wrapped him 
about like a garment. 

The rum of those country stores made ter- 
rible drunkards, whose vices and idiosyn- 
crasies were brought out, by their isolation, 
with clear-cut distinctness. Their wives were 
white-faced, hopeless women; their houses 
were dismal with the signs of a drunkard's 
unthrift. The whole tragedy was so plainly 
stamped that he who ran might read. ^N'o 
home was ever so little of a home as that of a 
drunkard in the country ; no life ever seemed 
so utterly unnatural, so warped a life as his. 
The very blessings of his inheritance mocked 
at him. Space and quiet and sunshine and 
verdure, and every other thing which especially 
marks country life, only made more apparent 
his poverty and degradation. One could always 



SPRING-TIME AND HAYING. 65 

tell the home of a drunkard, with its clap- 
boards and shingles slipping oiF; its windows 
stuffed with rags ; its unhinged doors ; its 
tumbling outbuildings, shattered, ragged, lean- 
ing, tottering, solemn with the unutterable 
pathos of a lost life. 

If you have never lived in the country, you 
can have no idea what grim and strange and 
repulsive spectacles these men become, on the 
surface of its pure, calm, undemonstrative life. 
I recall three who, on town-meeting and 
training days, used to stagger up and down 
the highways. Children shrank from them as 
if they had been lepers. One of them had 
children of his own, who grew up rough and 
wicked, and became the outlaws of the neigh- 
borhood ; to whom the fair landscape was only 
a field for plunder, and against whom the 
hearts of all the village people seemed to be 
turned. God forgive them ! , circumstance was 
hard upon them, — they were only drunkard's 
children. 

Another was once possessed of a brilliant 
intellect. Poor, lost man ! his house was the 
forlornest of all ; perched high on a hill, 
tumbling, and fluttering with rags. His large 
and once valuable farm was overrun with 
brambles. His wife was never seen outside 
her wretched home. Her existence grew 



QQ NEW ENGLAND BYGONES. 

to be a sort of myth. She died and was 
buried, and no one missed her. 

Jim, who danced in his cups, was foolish 
and diverting to the youngsters; still his 
antics seemed disgustingly uncouth in the 
decorous quiet of a country town. 

When a young child, I went to the sale of 
a drunkard's home with the lawyer who had 
the foreclosure of a mortgage upon it. If I 
live to be a hundred years old I shall never 
forget that sale. The place had once been a 
fruitful one, and had come down from father 
to son through several generations. Drunk- 
enness had wrested it from the hands of him 
from whom it was to be sold. The man's wife 
was a handsome but heart-broken woman. I 
shall never behold a look of more utter despair 
than that which her face wore that day. It 
was a harsh scene : I see and hear it all, — the 
mocking sunbeams ; the loud voice of the 
auctioneer ; the coarse laughter of the crowd ; 
the woman, pacing the floor, sighing, never 
speaking, and as ghastly as if she had been 
among the dead. The final bid came. "With 
one wail she went out of the room, and I never 
saw her more. 

The processes by which the year brings about 
her miracles are full of beauty. The hum- 
blest farm laborer can take no working posture 



SPRING-TIME AND HAYING. 67 

which will not be picturesque, framed into a 
spring landscape. I recall the grain-sower 
flinging broadcast his seed; frolicksome ur- 
chins dropping the sprouting bulbs ; bonfires 
from last year's stubble and new clearings, 
giving brown shadow to outl^ang verdure. 
Hoeing and ploughing and carting and cutting 
and digging; the men who worked, and the 
works they fashioned, were moulded into the 
earth's form and substance. It was as if the 
country were an ever-shifting kaleidoscope, 
constantly changing old forms and hues into 
new shades and shapes. 

Its marvels began with the breaking up of 
brooks, when they started to roar and tumble 
and overflow their banks. The fish, which at 
night flashed by in these spring waters, gave a 
transient sport to men and boys, who sought 
for them by light of pitchpine torches. Flit- 
ting about with nets and spears, in the uncer- 
tain blaze of their bonfires, their loud shouts 
heard above the roaring of the stream, they 
gave a weird aspect to the valley ; a charming 
exaggeration of the untamed scenery of early 
spring-time. 

Nothing gives more expression to a field or 
pasture than one of these brooks. Its wonders 
never cease. Its spring fury and overflow last 
but a few days. It is, in fact, a most placid 



08 NEW ENGLAND BYGONES. 

tiling, rippling over smooth pebbles or pliant 
grass, pure, transparent, and enticing. It is 
prettiest when running, in and out its tortuous 
way, tbrough pasture-knolls, full of rocky fords, 
its banks ricb with ferns and wild flag and 
orchis, — or, better still, through the heart of 
an old wood, where it grows mysterious, and 
hugs to its soggy sides such plants as love 
shade and moisture. A brook is one of the 
friendliest, sweetest things you can stumble 
upon in your wanderings ; and the one which 
you first knew is remembered with much ten- 
derness, — the dense woodland from whence it 
came ; the ferns and pallid grass, which Avere 
half dragged out with it; the pebbly bed, into 
which it widened ; the dark pool, beloved by 
trout; the show of coltsfoot, beset by house- 
wives ; the sharp-pointed rocks, which helped 
you over ; the patch of orchis, and the long 
stretch of rushes ; the mint and the bog 
onions, — but why go on ? for this babbler was 
my brook and not yours ! 

As the season wore on grasses grew stout 
and tall; heavy showers lodged them; and 
truant boys and girls made unthrifty paths 
throu2:h the fields. Farmers bes^an to whet 
their scythes and plant their grindstones under 
shady trees ; sure signs of coming haying. 
The delights of those hayings have outlasted 



SPRING-TIME AND HAYING. 69 



years, and the aroma of tliem still pervades 
every ripened field. Time has not changed 
the teeming life of nature. When I see little 
heads hobbing up and down in yonder meadow 
yellow with buttercups, I remember that straw- 
berries used to grow where buttercups blos- 
somed. I:^ew shadows are chasing each other 
over ripening grain ; familiar fruits lie every- 
where ; the forest-trees, just as they used, over- 
lap each other with shaded folds of intense 
verdure. Fulness of sunshine falls every- 
where on fulness of vegetation. Back to me, 
throuo-h the features of the present, come 
memories of the past. 

Late in June I hear a familiar sound,— the 
sharp click of a scythe making a beginnhig 
of the mid-year harvest. The year is waxing 
old. The yellow stubble of the first-mown 
field tells that ; and it has a suggestive deso- 
lateness. What odor so sweet as that of new- 
mown hay? It is the breath of the dying 
grass, of which there is no wisp so small that, 
when I sever it, it shall not send forth this 
delicious scent to tell me of bygone days of 
abundant and beautiful harvests. 

Of all the waste luxuriance which the earth 
pours forth in her yearly ripening, this^ is 
the most beautiful and beautifying. Lying 
broadcast upon fields, threading them in care- 



70 NEW ENGLAND BYGONES. 

less windrows ; flung together in heaps ; trail- 
ing from ladened carts ; crowning oxen and 
laborers with fantastic wreaths ; in whatever 
place it finds or flings itself, it is the same de- 
lightful, sw^eet-scented, dying grass. There is 
no earth so flat, no landscape so tame, that its 
yearly hay harvest shall not undulate it into 
lines of beauty. Up and down the dusty high- 
way, jolting about uneven fields, the homely 
carts used to go, gathering up their precious 
loads, slowly wreathing their rails and wheels 
and shafts. * 

I can see my grandfather wiping the sweat 
from his brow, and curiously eying the sky, 
— treacherous sky, playing pranks with the 
best plans and labors, but all-creative in 
putting new life into a summer landscape. 
Piling up, snow-white, these clouds come, 
some hot August afternoon, out of the hori- 
zon, very beautiful at first, but treacherous, 
and the dread of hay-makers. They at once 
define their edges with a soft-tinted rose color, 
and grow apace. They roll on, with stately 
march, towards the zenith, right over the 
anxious workers and waiting harvests. Grow- 
ing angry, getting lurid, overlapping each 
other with brazen folds, threatening, they 
sound their warning of low-muttered thunder, 
condense their brightness into vivid lightning, 



««.■ 



SPRING-TIME AND HAYING. 71 

and the whole ^kj grows dense and black with 
pent-up waters. 

Farmers used to fly to each other's aid at 
such times, running like bees about the fields, 
goading and urging on their laggard oxen, 
— Broad and Bright and Cherry and Star. 
Carts strained and groaned like living things ; 
clouds flew higher and higher ; little chil- 
dren tugged in the eager race ; the hay blew 
out in long streamers with the wild winds; 
the scurrying drops came thicker and thicker ; 
the storm burst at last ; when, as if by magic, 
men and oxen and teams vanished, and the 
wind and rain had their way with the mown 
and unmown grasses left in the fields. 

The noonings were bright features of a hay- 
ing landscape. At summons of horn, away 
went the workers through lanes and highways 
to their noontide meal. More often, to save 
time, they took it in the field. I see and hear 
it all, — men stretching their brawny limbs 
upon the hay-heaps ; oxen chewing the new- 
mown grass under shadow of their loads ; bare- 
footed boys and girls scudding about with 
lunch-pails and pitchers ; the drone of bees ; 
the chirrup of grasshoppers ; the babbling of 
the brook ; the lapping of the mill-pond ; and 
many undertones of nature brought out by 
the unusual quiet of this hour. Oh the peace, 



72 NEW ENGLAND BYGONES. 



the glory, given b}^ those summer noonings to 
the tired bodies and cramped souls of working 
men ! Whether they knew it or not^ some- 
thin o" of the fervor of the meridian sunshine, 
something of the earnestness of the mid-day 
nature, something of the fulness of the mid- 
year harvest went into them, through their 
senses, and bore fruit in thankfulness and 
patience. Something of the narrowness of 
their ordinary lives went out of them un- 
awares. 

The nooning over, bustle again prevailed. 
There was no faltering, no let up, until the 
horn gave notice of the evening meal. Then, 
through lanes and highway, fields let out their 
workers, who cheered their homeward way 
with simple talk. They went over the day's 
labors ; forecasted the sky, and planned the 
toils of the morrow ; prone all to the rest of 
the coming night. Into the barns were shoved 
the ladened racks, to be emptied in the early 
morning ; down into the west sank the sun ; 
over the beautiful creation of the harvest fell 
the older beauty of night ; and unto weariness, 
and to the patience of labor, past and to come, 
floated, with noiseless motion, sweet, dream- 
less, strength-giving sleep. 



CHAPTER y. 

THE VISIT. 

We were would-be haymakers, Benny and 
I, jogging- along with Jonathan the man-ser- 
vant, in an old market-wagon, towards our 
grandfather's farm. As remembered, we made 
a homely load, but a happj^ one. We were 
half wild with joy, and chattered like magpies 
all the way about our promised delights. 

The whole universe was ours that day. We 
were not simply wayfarers to our grandfather's 
farm, but travellers at large; and the narrow 
circle of the horizon seemed as vast to us as 
the belt of the whole continent would now. 
We felt well; and if, in passing, travellers 
eyed us sharply, we were sure that they knew 
us for young haymakers. It never occurred to 
us that our equipage was unusual. The only 
fault we found was with the slowness of our 
pace and the jolting of the springless wagon ; 
but the one gave our quick eyes a chance to 
spy out way-side wonders, and the other sent 
the blood into our cheeks. I am quite sure 
that we had a better time than we should have 

6 73 



74 NEW ENGLAND BYGONES. 

had with my grandfather's pretentious chaise 
and one of his smarter horses. 

I can see now the yellow lilies we counted 
among the pines that day. I have loved yellow 
lilies ever since. They were cheerful things to 
a child's eye, gleaming out from an old forest. 
They were almost as pretty alongside the front 
door-steps of unpainted country-houses, where 
they paled somewhat, multiplied, and grew in 
clumps; whereas in the forest each blossom 
stood by itself in flaunting brightness, and 
seemed to come out of the wood to meet you. 

The country through which we passed on 
our journey was sparsely settled, and mostly 
covered with a thin forest of old pines. This 
forest was full of a shaggy undergrowth of 
scrub-oaks and knolls of low huckleberrv- 
bushes. The day was hot, and everything 
0^1 owed with sunlio^ht. In vain we turned 
our umbrella this way and that. Its Avhale- 
bones creaked ; the sun's rays pierced straight 
through it, past our straw hats, into our little 
brains ; and we settled down, only to have our 
shoulders half baked by the high wagon-back. 
The sand of the road-side glittered ; the wheel- 
tires sank into it and came up hot and bright. 
Each stone was a reflecting mirror, and the 
business of every leaf and twig seemed to be 
to absorb and send forth heat. The quiet was 



THE VISIT. 75 



SO perfect that the slightest crackle of a twig 
was distinctly heard. Yet, underlying this 
glare and seeming silence was a certain posi- 
tive procession of sound. 

We shut our eyes from sheer weariness, 
and w^ere lulled to sleep by this soft drone of 
living, growing, ever-renewing nature. You 
country-livers know what this voice is, which 
has no alphabet, no written language, but 
which is nevertheless an all-pervading, thrill- 
ing monotone, best rendered in what are called 
her solitudes. Benny said he could hear things 
grow ; and surely the wise little head both saw 
and heard many beautiful things that day. 

So we young haymakers were not ashamed 
of the springless, rattling old market-wagon. 
E'either were we ashamed of Jonathan, with 
his homespun clothes and leathern whip, chew- 
ing his cud like an ox, and shouting to his horse 
with a never-ending " git ap." This horse was 
not a fine-looking beast. She was a true farm- 
horse, broad-backed and round-sided, carry- 
ing her head low, with a shaggy mane. She 
was old and not ambitious, pacing along, at 
the rate of five miles an hour, with a lumber- 
ing gait which gave a double jolt to the clumsy 
wagon. She was, however, to be respected 
for her age and her safety ; and, known by the 
name of Betsy, had been for almost thirty 



76 ^EW ENGL AND BYG ONES. 

years carefally tended by the family of whicli 
she was a true member. E'ew England farm- 
ers were all merciful to their beasts of burden, 
and this kindness was a natural expression of 
the ingrained justice of their natures. 

But one horse in the neio-hborhood was older 
than this one of my grandfather's, and that 
belonged to the aged minister of the parish. 
His horse, roaming at large, was as much a 
feature of the village landscape as its meeting- 
house or its school-house. It grew into the 
history and the traditions of the place. It was 
an unaggressive, harmless animal, and came 
to hold a sort of feeble kinship with all the 
villagers. When an absentee asked after the 
townspeople and their affairs, he also asked ^ 
after the parson's horse ; and thus the unwit- 
ting beast came to be a representative of an 
enlarged humanit3\ This horse, long toothless 
and fed upon porridge, was so defiant of mor- 
tality that, out of sheer compassion, it was 
slain at last outside the village. I verily be- 
lieve that the young men and maidens of the 
parish who had grown up during the lifetime 
of this dumb creature, and were used to the 
constant sight of it by the way-side, mourned 
the loss of the " parson's horse" with almost a 
sentiment of human friendship. 

The Betsy of my grandfather's must have 



THE VISIT. 77 



come of hardy stock, for she, too, outlived for 
several years her usefulness, and wandered 
during the summer, a hobbling, gray pensioner, 
upon the shore of the mill-pond, where one 
day she was found stark and stiff, close by 
the old boat. She used, when past service, to 
limp up to the pasture-bars and lean her old 
head upon the upper rail, giving us children 
a sort of blear-eyed recognition which w^as 
quite touching. To see this head bobbing up 
and down amongst the far-off alder-bushes 
was ^as pathetic to our child-hearts as if the 
poor creature could have talked and reasoned 
wdth us. We were glad wdien she gave up 
the ghost in a natural way, for my grandfather 
could not consent to have her killed. 

Benny and I did not after all make a very 
mean appearance on our first visit alone to 
our grandfather's farm. We w^ere only two 
untaught children going to a haying. Our 
equipage and our dress w^ere suited to our 
calling. We were bent on a kindly errand, 
— we were to carry youth and cheerfulness, 
and so joy, into the great lonely house of an 
old man. Being imaginative children, and 
having little book learning, that which we 
desired to believe, and which fact failed to 
give us, we coined out of our own brains. 
The seven-mile sandy plain, with its pines 



78 ^^W ENGLAND BYGONES. 

and dwarf-oaks, we declared to be no less 
than forty miles long; whilst a moderate-sized 
pond Benny confidently whispered behind 
Jonathan's back could be no other than the 
Dead Sea itself. Yet this simple-hearted 
Benny was over-wise for his years about 
everything which could be coaxed by search 
and observation from the outlying landscape 
of his home, and he was, besides, a charming 
young romancer. It is delightful to go back 
to one's days of just such fresh-hearted credu- 
lity. Some of our childhood faiths may have 
been very foolish indeed, but many of them 
were beautiful, and we are tender of them all in 
miemory in after-years. We can aiford to lose 
none of them, for these same foolish beliefs 
were wise to us once, and swelled the sum of 
our earthly joys. 

In my grandfather's time, when railroads 
had not permeated Eastern 'New England, a 
long journey was an epoch in a child's life; 
and that was called such which was accom- 
plished by several days of slow-paced travel. 
It was made a subject for private devotion and 
public prayer. " Our brother and sister about 
to go on a long journey" became marked people 
in the parish. Neighbors " dropped in of 
evenings" to talk the matter over ; and it was 
dreamed about and wrought for many weeks 



THE VISIT. 79 



beforehand. The finest fabrics of the house 
were set aside and shaped over for that child 
who was going to Boston, or perhaps to some 
nearer town ; to whom most likely was* given 
especial and lighter tasks, as one upon whom 
the unction of travel had already fallen. The 
night before the start was a busy one in the 
farm-house. Many last stitches were to be 
taken, and the bandbox or small trunk to be 
packed by the careful mother. The child's 
wardrobe, made for the occasion, was meagre,' 
but clean and strong. It was the best the 
farm had to give, and was fine to the wearer. 

I can see Farmer Brown starting off with 
his daughter Sally, bound for Boston, just as 
he started over forty years ago. He was a 
well-to-do farmer, homely, but shrewd and 
honest, and had held high places of town trust. 
How exactly he is recalled ! His broad collar 
seems to cut his ears with its sharp edges, and 
his stock clasps his neck like a vice. His blue- 
black homespun suit has been long made, but 
well kept, and its showy buttons are of double 
gilt. Sally's frock is of store calico, with a 
white rufiie in the neck. The shawl she wears, 
of some printed pongee stuff, is a family heir- 
loom, which her grandmother wore before her. 
Her bonnet, too gay and too small for her, has 
just come from Boston, a gift from her seldom- 



80 ^Vi&ir ENGLAND BYGONES. 

seen uncle, who now and then thrusts a town 
gaud upon this neglected country relative. 
The family of this uncle they are going to 
visit. The innocent souls have not waited for 
an invitation. With them the instinct of kin- 
ship is as strong as their faith in their religion. 
For six months the mother's busy brain and 
fingers have toiled over fine twined threads of 
wheel and loom, to weave for this young girl 
an outfit suitable for this great occasion. She 
is a blithesome lass, just grown up, and is en- 
gaged to teach the village school. 

They climb into the lumbering wagon. The 
younger children swarm about them, whilst 
the dear mother stands in the doorway with 
bared arms, shading her eyes with her hand, 
and watches them until they are gone out of 
sight under the hill. Sally is the envy of 
all the other village girls, and mothers gossip 
together of this weighty journey of hers. 

Many an aged country-reared person knoAvs 
what that journey was to Sally; how grand 
and mysterious the town seemed to her, with 
its many streets, its crowds of people, its 
various wares, and its many lights ; how, im- 
pressed and oppressed by it, she grew self- 
conscious and lonely, and wished herself home 
ao:ain. Her uncle's house was an enchanted 
palace to her, and she a dazed girl in it. It 



THE VISIT. 81 



was revealed to her that what pertained ,to 
herself and to her father was not in keeping 
with her surroundings. They were plainly- 
dressed, homespun country-people, well clad 
alongside the deep greens and russet hrowns 
of their farm, but ill assorting with gay town 
fashions. She saw and took in much. Her 
keen senses and bright mind were quick- 
ened to a wider scope by this somewhat un- 
palatable taste of strange living. The day of 
her departure was a relief to her. She went 
back as she came, except that she was lightly 
laden with simple purchases. She was as 
warmly welcomed as if she had come from a 
foreign land. The trinkets she had bouo;ht 
were as marvellous to her mother and the other 
children as they would have been to her once. 
She somewhat pitied their ignorance, but kept 
her own counsel. She was wiser than before 
she went, but not quite so happy. A glory 
had gone out of her home which could never 
come back. Its rooms were lower and nar- 
rower; and their fitness had been lost from 
the garments which had been fashioned for 
her with so much care. Their textures and 
dyes were homespun, and so less esteemed. 
She made a better teacher for havins: been 
to Boston, because she had more weisrht with 
her scholars. But the sweetest relish of her 



82 -V^I^ ENGLAND BYGONES. 

rural home had died out for her. In later 
years it came again, as a delightful memory. 
She would then have given half she possessed 
to have been starting once more from the old 
farm-house, a simple-hearted girl in calico by 
the side of the homespun father, with the 
dear mother watching her from the doorway. 
Our old horse plodded along so wearily that 
the shadows had grown long on the neigh- 
boring hills, and cow-bells were tinkling at 
the pasture-bars, when we drove through 
the gateway at the end of the green lane. 
Far away we had caught sight of our grand- 
father standino' in his door. We knew him 
by his gray hair tossed in the wind. " He's 
an old dear," whispered Benny; "just a little 
cross sometimes, but never cross to me." I^o, 
he was never cross to little Benny, and seldom 
to any other child. He was a most orderly 
man, and was apt to lose patience when chil- 
dren upset his settled ways. He never was 
known to scold Benny, for the boy was his 
namesake, and had about him, he used to 
say, the look of those who die young. There 
was an unusual trembling of the aged hand 
which patted our heads, and a very tender 
greeting of the old man to us. Then he held 
us at arms' length, saying, with a merry tw^inkle 
in his eye, " So you young rascals have come 



THE VISIT. 83 



to haying, have you ? Well, I must say, your 
mother needn't have rigged you out like two 
Arabs; still, I think you'll do." Happy little 
Benny thought he was praising our looks, and 
told me shortly that Arabs must be some grand 
people. 

My grandfather was a keen-witted, resolute, 
handsome man of good English stock. His 
life was as methodical as clock-work. His 
thrift wrested a competence from the soil; 
but his best legacy to his descendants was a 
certain inborn freedom of soul. He loved 
every inch of his farm, not as a plougher and 
plodder, but as an observer and thinker. So 
positive and self-asserting was this high type 
of his manhood that his only son, when ex- 
ceptionally well educated and of exalted rank 
in his profession, never seemed more than his 
equal. Having lived past his fourscore years, 
he ended his prosperous and reputable life by 
a death of serene dignity. 

He was called stern by his fellow-townsmen; 
but no man or woman ever questioned his in- 
tegrity. His career, considering the possibili- 
ties of his nature, was a narrow one, but of 
the best, so far as it went. It had little gilt 
and polish, — not enough of recreation, — ^but 
such as it was, he took it up patiently and 
faithfully, and got out of it whatever of good 



84 ^^^W ENGLAND BYGONES. 

it had in it. He did Avitli all his might what- 
ever he had to do, which was so much that it 
crowded his life to the vers^e of servitude. 
He was serious and earnest, if not stern, be- 
cause the demands of his lot left little room 
for lighter moods, so that a higher sense of 
justice and humanity was born of this half- 
tragic element of his condition. 

The children of such fathers were well- 
trained children. The parent's will was law 
with them, and the law of the parent was the 
word of God. These unpetted yet deeply-loved 
sons and daughters were truthful and honest. 
They were respecters of age, keepers of the 
Sabbath, and clean in all their ways, because 
their home tuition had been founded upon the 
highest principles of religion and morality. 
Tears and tender words did not come easilv to 
such hard workers and simple livers. They 
had an element of heroic resistance to what 
they considered weakness, and a Spartan esti- 
mation of all tokens of it. Mothers could lay 
out their dead children for burial, and fathers 
could look upon them with tearless eyes. 
The}- would put them in graves close to their 
homes, and then go back to their old grooves, 
giving little outward sign. But the hurt was 
there, deep and for all time. These massive 
old heroes, these truthful, earnest wrestlers 



THE VISIT. 85 



for duty, held tlieir reticence as a comely in- 
stinct, — a sacred inner life. 

The Christian New Englander of forty years 
ago was most reverent. His children were 
God's trust to him ; as such he trained them, 
and as such he gave them up. If he unwisely 
crucified the tastes and desires of his sons and 
daughters, it was because of his own blind 
zeal and an overstraining of Bible precepts. 
If any of them, in morality, fell short of the 
home standard, he was more smitten by it than 
he would have been by their death. 

After a supper of bread and milk, Benny 
and I were sent to bed, with orders to be up 
bright and early for the haying. The sun was 
already making great red streaks across the 
checked hangings in the east chamber when 
Benny's tap at my door, and the patter of his 
little feet across the sanded floor, startled me 
from an uneasv slumber. I had been dream- 
ing of the enclosure in the mowing-field. I 
thought we were gathering buttercups on 
Olly's grave, when a great pit suddenly 
yawned, and Benny fell into it. '' Quicb, 
we are almost ready," he shouted, and then 
ran away, '' to help fix off," he said. He had 
pumped a basin of fresh water, which, with a 
clean towel, awaited me on the wooden bench 
at the back-door. I scrubbed my face and 



86 NEW ENGLAND BYGONES. 

hands with zest in that tin basin, and would 
be willing to-day to taste, in the same homely 
way, the pleasant abandon of that summer 
morning, if with it would come back the 
scents and voices, the glowing light, and the 
simple occupations of its long-past, happy day. 

We ate no breakfast, Benny and I, we were 
too happy for that; besides, a huge basket 
under Jonathan's arm was, Hannah whis- 
pered, " brimful of goodies." The leathern- 
handled keg puzzled us ; but Benny was a 
philosopher, and, pointing to the flies swarm- 
ing about its spigot, confidently declared that 
it held some savory drink. 

The smallest rakes were laid aside for the 
new hands, as our grandfather jocosely called 
us, and we were left to follow after the loads. 
Our little fists grew red and speckled ; but 
Benny said they would soon be tough like 
Jonathan's, and the fun of treading down 
the sweet hay and jolting over the sill of the 
barn more than made up for all our ills. '' Our 
new hands ain't so green after all," remarked 
spruce David to his fellow-mower. " Tell 
better arter the new's ofi:"," was Jonathan's bluft" 
reply. " Tlie old clown !" whispered Benny. 
" How clever David is !" said I. 

By and by, when the sun had gotten into 
the zenith, we began to feel hot and tired, and 



THE VISIT. 87 



cast longing glances towards the shady rock 
by the spring, behind which were the keg and 
bundle. My grandfather, seeing us lag, took 
pity upon us, and sent us there to rest. We 
ate our share of the lunch, and took Ions* 
draughts of sweetened water from the keg. 
Benny thought there was too much ginger in 
it, but drank freely. Alas ! for the struggling 
fly which, sticking fast upon Benny's nose, 
daubed over with molasses, made us fora*et to 
put back the spigot. When the thirsty mowers 
came round the rock the keg was empty, 

"So much for babies in haying -time," 
growled Jonathan. My grandfather looked 
severe, and told us to " start for the house." 
So we did, David slipping round the rock to 
say to us that it was no matter, for he would 
fill the keg again. 

We idled the afternoon sadly away in the 
old farm-house. True to human nature, Ave 
little ones turned against each other. "You 
are black as a crow," said Benny. "And 
you," retorted I, " are as speckled as an ad- 
der." '' All from this hateful haying," Benny 
went on. Then, common grief making com- 
mon cause, we came together again; and, 
pledging everlasting absence from the haying 
field, we dwelt in love and harmonv until bed- 
time. Somehow my tired little body would 



88 ^EW ENGLAND BYGONES. 

not rest that night. I had another frightful 
dream about a deep pit and little Benny. I 
kept waking up ; but the bed-curtains looked 
so black, and the dimly-seen windows so 
ghostly, that I shut my eyes and lay trembling 
with fear half the night. It was very late the 
next morning when I was awakened by the 
merry haymakers under my window, on their 
way to the mowing-field. Above every other 
voice rang out Benny's, glad and care free. 

After that the haying -time passed away 
quickly and merrily. Best of holidays to me ; 
from which have come some of the brightest 
pictures and purest sentiments of my life. Pay- 
day came. Jonathan and David received their 
well-earned wages ; scores of transient helpers 
had come and gone ; Benny and I each clasped 
in our brown hands four bright silver dollars. 

The big gate opened to let out the market- 
wagon, with two joyous-hearted children. 
Their clothes were much the worse for wear, 
and they looked even queerer than they did 
when they came. They turned tenderly back 
to the white-haired old man, who watched 
them from the porch-door. " I'll come again 
very soon," called Benny. He did come, and 
the big gate opened wide to let him in. 



CHAPTER YI. 



LITTLE BENNY. 



The summer liarvest was past, but not tlie 
remembrance of it. Benny and I were ever 
counting the months, and then the weeks, 
before another haying. We spent our holi- 
days in the making of miniature rakes, and 
were o:arrulous the whole winter with our 
simple memories, ^o story-book couhl give 
us pleasure like going over the past summer's 
homely life. We talked much of little things : 
of the maimed lamb that limped at our call to 
his evening meal; the speckled trout in the 
deep old well ; the play rock ; the herds ; the 
apple-trees; and much, very much, of the 
dear, trembling old man, who never seemed 
old to us, over whom the unreasoning love 
of childhood cast the glamour of immortal 
youth. 

There was to be a jubilee, in anticipation 
of which I had exchanged my grandfather's 
dollars for bright ribbons, whilst Benny's had 
gone into the price of a pair of fine gaiters. 
The long-wished-for morning came. Benny's 

7 89 



90 ^EW ENGLAND BYGONES. 

little jacket, with a white collar pinned to its 
neck, hung from a nail in the wall ; his new 
gaiters stood upon the mantel. Bennj could 
not wear them then. I entered into the sports 
of that day with all the buoyancy of child- 
hood; and though I heard Benny's moans as 
I passed the half-opened door, I did not think 
at evening to bid him good-night or give him 
his wonted kiss. Giddy girl ! That same 
sick Benny was the gay companion of haying- 
time. 

Ever thus selfish is J03\ What sympathy 
can gladness have with sorrow ? If death has 
never entered your own household, you can 
carry little consolation to the mourner, — ^your 
words will be as sounding brass and tinkling 
cymbals. Days passed away ; long, weary days. 
The gaiters still kept their place on the mantel ; 
the white collar had become yellow with smoke 
and dust, but still it stayed. Benny no longer 
asked about the jubilee, and T shrank from his 
darkened room. How anxiously I watched 
the doctor's face as he softly emerged from the 
sick-chamber ! How my little heart beat if 
ever its wonted benis-nant smile returned ! 

One morning (Benny had been ill two 
weeks) I w^as awakened by the rumbling of 
a vehicle. There was no mistaking the sound; 
it was the old market-wagon. In a few min- 



LITTLE BENNY. 91 



utes I was by my grandfather's side. There 
was no tremulous grasp of the hand, no gentle 
greeting, no fond pat on the head. His 
thoughts were with Benny, his namesake. 

" Tread softly," whispered the doctor, as I 
led my grandfather to the side of the sick- 
bed. He leaned heavily on his staff, and a 
tear trickled down his furrowed cheek. 

" Benny will not help us hay another year," 
said the old man to me, in broken tones. How 
that death-knell fell on my soul ! Was Benny, 
the good, the beautiful Benny, to die and be 
buried in the cold, damp earth ! It could not 
be; and yet, as I looked at him the terrible 
conviction forced itself upon me. His little 
brown hands had become thin and white, his 
cheeks sunken. He opened his eyes. 

'^ Benny, do you know me ?" asked grand- 
father, fondly. 

He murmured incoherently something about 
haying-time, the big rock, and the mowing- 
field. Again my grandfather dropped a tear. 
It was more than my childish heart could 
bear. I ran to my chamber, and throwing 
myself upon the bed yielded to the first sharp 
agony of life. Oh, it is a fearful thing to pass 
for the first time through the gates of sorrow ! 

It was dark, very dark, when I was awakened 
by a light tap upon my shoulder. I knew the 



92 ^EW ENGLAND BYGONES. 

touch; it was my grandfather's hand. I asked 
no questions, but followed him instinctively to 
the sick-room. I knew that Benny, my loved 
Benny, was dying. 

There was no shrinking from the mysterious 
threshold. In the agony of that moment I 
could not cry, but stood by the side of the 
dear boy as cold, calm, and still almost as 
himself. There was no look of recognition ; 
no word from the palsied tongue. One gasp, 
one quiver of the thin lip, and the fragile 
chord which bound his pure soul to earth 
was broken, — there was no longer in that 
household a little Benny. It was a most 
solemn death-room. A mother wept for her 
lost one, and refused to be comforted ; a father 
was bowed in agony for the child of his heart ; 
and, more touching still, the silvered locks of 
decrepit age mingled with the golden curls of 
lifeless childhood. 

Thus it is — the child sports a brief hour; 
manhood leagues with mammon a few sliort 
years ; and only here and there is given a long 
life. 

Rummao:ino^ not lon^: since anion o;st some 
old letters, I came upon one directed in faded 
ink to my grandfather. It could hardly be 
deciphered, so worn and discolored was it by 
time. It was a summons to Benny's bed- 



LITTLE BENNY. 93 



side. At the bottom of the page, in an old 
man's tremulous hand, was this postscript : 
" Benny died of brain fever the next day, at 
ten of the clock p.m. He was my best beloved 
grandchild." 

For weeks I mourned for my lost play- 
mate. His chair kept its place in the corner ; 
the miniature rakes were fondly cherished; 
the collar was still unpinned. By chance one 
day the chair was moved; anon the rusty 
pin was drawn from the jacket, and one by 
one the little rakes disappeared. The next 
haying-time found me almost as blithe and 
gay as ever. Thus evanescent are the griefs 
of early childhood. 

Little Benny was buried on the old farm. 
It was my grandfather's wish that he should be. 
People came from far and near to his funeral. 
They made a quaint throng, — hard-faced men 
and women, serious and sympathetic, and 
young men and maidens, with a curious awe 
at this, in the country, unusual presentment 
of the sublime beauty of a dead child. All 
along the farm-yard fence, as far as to the 
farther gate, stood the homely teams of these 
people, who had left their tasks to show their 
respect and sympathy for their neighbor. This 
congregating of wagons about a country house 
was a sure token of woe, more sio-nificant and 



94 NEW ENGLAND BYGONES. 

toucliing than any bands of crape ; so also was 
the decorous going in and out of the silent 
throng. Seen from a distance, they made a 
solemn pageant contrasted with the usual 
quiet of a country home. 

Benny lay in his coffin between the Avindows 
of the " fore room," — that room which was 
never used save for some memorial purpose. 
Its doors and windows were flung wide open 
now, and the bright sunshine streamed athwart 
the child's face and kindled it into a marvel- 
lous life likeness. He had few flowers about 
him ; but from the garden and the fields out- 
side came the scent of blossoms he had loved, 
and sweet-smelling things were clasped in 
the hands of the women. He seemed not to 
be dead, but asleep ; and most tenderly did 
nature caress this clay image of her child- 
lover with her best summer gifts. The 
mourners, with their dearest friends, sat about 
the boy, thus holding fast to him to the hast. 
The preacher stood upon the threshold of 
the fore room, talking mostly to them, and 
praying for them with a painful personality. 
He did not, however, forget the application of 
his text and the lesson of the day to the peo- 
ple in the other rooms. His voice pervaded 
every corner of the house, and the breeze 
caught it up and carried it to the traveller 



LITTLE BENNY. 95 



on the highway, — a solemn sound. When he 
had finished Farmer Brown, in his homely way, 
but with a voice tender with sorrow, said, 
" The mourners can now look at the child." 

Did you ever respond to such a call ? 
What measure is there to the agony of this 
last silent interview with the unresponsive 
dead; this unanswered greeting of one who, 
for time, is lost in the most irrevocable sense ; 
this unheeded letting-out of the afi:ections to 
what is already going back to dust ? 

Next to the mourners, the neighbors were 
invited to take a last look at the departed. 
Keenly, as if it were but yesterday, do I re- 
member the sweet speech of this unpolished 
man ; the instinctive shrinking of this tender- 
hearted rustic from thrusting a cruel fact upon 
those wdiom it most concerned. The relatives 
were asked to look upon their child as upon 
one wdio slept ; the neighbors, for the last time, 
upon the dead. They all — men, women, and 
children — took their turn over the little cofiin. 
They were greatly moved, even the hardest 
featured of them. Men drew their horny 
hands over their eyes, and women sobbed 
aloud over this child, whom many of them 
had never seen while living, but who, dead, 
w^rought from their suppressed natures this 
miracle of emotion. 



96 -^^^W ENGLAND BYGONES. 

He lay there, his golden curls and long lashes 
sun-gilded, and clinging to his marhle image 
with strange brightness. He was to them a 
new and beautiful revelation. He was as un- 
like their own children as if he had belons-ed 
to another race. Death could not chisel the 
best of their own into his likeness. They 
saw, but could not comprehend, the rare 
quality of this child, and so they looked upon 
him and wept in wonder. He was too beauti- 
ful, they said, to be put out of sight; and 
nature seemed to rebuke them while she 
smiled upon all the stages of this his last 
and little journey. The sun sank towards 
the west, and from beyond the woodland and 
pasture it streamed across the open grave, and 
filled the thing itself with a waiting glory. 
The child was covered and carried across the 
green field, and let down into it; and in a 
little while all there was left of the sad 
pageant of that summer's day was a small 
brown mound in si^ht of the west room 
window. 

It seems to me, as I look back, a sweet 
burial without dread, that carrying out of the 
lovely child from the old farm-house, amidst 
sunshine and tender mourning, and laying 
him down in the green field which he had 
made jocund the summer before with his de- 



LITTLE BENNY. 97 



light. We talked of this boy as having been 
cut off, but after all his little life had been 
full and complete and well rounded ; and when 
his short journey had come to an end, the sun- 
shine which he had brought with him flooded 
and followed him. His burial on it glorified 
the farm. He was always there, not as under 
the mound with its lettered stone, but as a 
true little Benny, who, unresponsive to touch 
or speech, did yet roam about the place. He 
has never grown old, but has grown grand 
with years. Tlie capacity of this child has been 
perfected by loving memory to the measure of 
the whole universe. He roams at Lars^e. I shall 
never know him here again, by sight or speech 
or touch, but one day we shall, I trust, know 
each other, not as we were, but as we are to be. 
Thus the watchers and waiters, whose going 
away from us tore our hearts, are to take the 
sting of death from us. They compelled us 
to shut them out of our earthly homes that 
they might welcome us into a heavenly. Dear 
children, you of earlier and you of later days, 
how will the mystery of your brief lives be un- 
ravelled when you shall come down resplen- 
dent to the shore of the shining river, that you 
may help over the old, the infirm, and the 
weary, who stayed behind and mourned for 



you ! 



CHAPTER VII. 

THE BURIAL-PLACE. 

My granclfixther's burial-place was witliin a 
stone's throw of the west room windows. To 
one coming from north or south, east or west, 
it was as conspicuous as the house itself. Its 
tablets were the ghosts of my childhood. They 
gave me many terrified waking hours, taking 
shape and motion to me as I stared at them 
from my chamber window. These family 
graveyards were a peculiar feature of the 
country. They gave pathos to a landscape, 
recording with tragic fidelity the sorrows and 
mortality of its inhabitants. My grandfather 
loved his burial-place. It was in the way of a 
straight path to the orchard and the mowing- 
field, but he seemed glad to be turned aside 
by it. No spot, he said, was too good for little 
Benny. He used to sit hour after hour at the 
window which overlooked it, the wind softly 
lifting his silvery hair, while he silently con- 
templated this smallest, but most precious, of 
all his fields. What was he thinking about ? 

what memories touched him ? what certainties 
98 



THE BURTAL-PLACE. 99 



awed him ? Watching with the keen eye of 
chiklhoocl I got no sign, for the spiritual life 
of this reticent old man was chary of utter- 
ance. He knew that in this bed he should 
some day be laid at rest ; and the more trem- 
bling his old limbs grew, the nearer his feet 
approached the borders of the silent land, the 
more he used to sit and gaze at his graves, and 
ponder, without doubt, upon the mysteries of 
the hereafter. 

These little fields were family heirlooms. 
E'o one could be so pinched by poverty, or so 
depraved in sentiment, as willingly to sell 
them. When farms changed owners, these 
were carefully exempted and fenced in. Oc- 
casionally circumstance so far removed, or 
Providence so blotted out, a posterity, that a 
grave became ownerless. Even then humanity 
kept it from hard usage. No question of util- 
ity could uproot from the sod the claim upon 
it of its first occupants. It was kept by their 
memory as firmly as when they held in living 
hands its written title-deeds. There comes 
especially to mind such a burial-place. It was 
upon a hillock in the corner of a field, at the 
end of a green lane : a lovely spot overlooking 
a wide stretch of country. A sweet apple- 
tree, always in summer full of fruit, overhung 
it. I see the uneven mound now, matted with 



100 ^EW ENGLAND BYGONES. 

grass, strewn with golden apples, and only 
telling by tradition of tlie presence of the 
dead. I remember how stealthily children 
climbed up the wall and snatched at over- 
hanging boughs. They were shy of the wind- 
falls on the other side, for these lonely graves 
were to fields what ghosts are to haunted 
chambers. 

My grandfather's old farm-house, with its 
lands, may go to strangers ; but the little field, 
first made precious to me by Benny's burial, 
shall remain undesecrated. Under every 
chancre of life I know that it will be to me 

o 

and my children a hallowed possession. Its 
mounds, whose tenants have gone back to the 
dust from whence they came, have given place 
to hollows full of rank grass and ^^arrow. Its 
slabs of perishable slate are seamed and fretted 
by the wear and tear of many years. Its 
tumbled wall is covered with raspberry-vines 
and sumachs, and a maple-tree has grown 
monumental with the years which have eaten 
away the inscriptions from the stones beneath 
it. E'ot long since I visited the spot. I plucked 
a blossom from a strawberry-vine which had 
thrown its tendrils into an old grave, and 
looked upon the uneven earth about me. 
Benny's little stone reproached me with its 
forty odd years of wear. I grew sorrowful. 



THE BURIAL-PLACE. 101 

Then from the luxuriant outgrowth around 
me came the assurance of hope in death; 
every crevice of the crumhling stones was 
teemins: with veo-etation. Growth had heen 
born of decay ; from death had sprung beau- 
tiful life. The sod itself had been ripened by 
giving back to it its rightful dust. Why then 
should one mourn when a spirit, let loose 
from its bonds, exchanges its kinship with 
sin and sorrow and pain for a glorious im- 
mortality ? 

" Sacred to the memory of the dead !" This 
is the most common legend, and also the truest 
and best. There is no being so mean that he 
may not claim for himself this epitaph. The 
grave is common ground. So far as this 
world goes, it brings all to the same level. 
The beggar is as sure of his morsel of earth 
as the prince is of his tomb. The rankness of 
the one is as eloquent as the pomp of the other. 
The prince was clothed in purple and fine 
linen, and the damp mould clasped him ; the 
beggar was clad in rags, and the busy grass 
wove for him a rentless covering. 

The world is full of unknown graves, of 
whose tenants she tells no stories ; the un- 
marked and uncared-for graves of people 
stranded by accident or circumstance ; of 
slaughtered soldiers ; of pioneers in new conn- 



102 ^^EW ENGLAND BYGONES. 

tries ; of martyrs to liberty ; of travellers in 
far lands. The sea is continually dragging 
into its hungry maw human life, which it ab- 
sorbs and hides as relentlessly as it washes 
away the sands of its shore. There is an un- 
utterable pathos in nameless graves. I have 
walked through acres strewn thick with sol- 
diers' bones, the harvest of great battles, ^o 
inscription has touched me like the simple 
" unknown" which breaks the monotony of 
their epitaphs. It tells that there lies a man, 
no matter how long and well he has fought for 
his country, who was so undowered by for- 
tune, so smitten by circumstance, that even his 
name has been lost! Yet no grave can be 
naked and forsaken, for trees and shrubs and 
grasses and flowers will grow on it, and over 
it spans the grand arch of heaven. 

In the pioneer days of I^ew England the 
churchyard was a favorite burial-place. The 
early settlers, beset by Indians, generally 
planted their meeting-houses upon hill-tops 
which overlooked the wooded country. They 
were thus less easily surprised, and better de- 
fended in case of danger. These meeting- 
houses had watch-towers ; were strong with 
oaken beams and barricades ; and on Sun- 
day were filled with armed worshippers. To 
hold out unsleeping through long services was 



THE BURIAL-PLACE. 103 



the chief effort of many of the overworked 
hearers. But the men, whose eyes were wide 
open, whose ears were quick to hear, whose 
thoughts were clear, condensed, their post 
was in the towers. !N"ot an unseen shadow 
passed over the woodland; not an unheard 
twig broke in it; scarcely the rustle of a leaf 
escaped them. Death, or worse, might be the 
price of one minute of laggard service. What 
a grand picture one of these heroic old watch- 
men would make, perched, defiant and faithful, 
on one of those bygone church-towers ; stand- 
ing there as much a w-arrior against the wild- 
ness of nature as the savageness of man. 
Gerome has painted a Mussulman calling to 
prayers from the minaret of a mosque. The 
turbaned old Turk, leaning from his lofty 
perch, gives a weird beauty to this cold, 
heathen picture. Our Christian w^atchman, 
lifted over the desolateness of the forest and 
the wiles of the savage, could not help stand- 
ing out from such a foreground with a clear- 
cut and sublime distinctness. 

It is curious to trace out on the highest 
point of some prominent New England land- 
scape the almost hidden outlines of one of 
these Christian strongholds, invisible to the 
passer-by, but positive and well-defined to the 
antiquary. I have seen the latter coax out 



104 ^EW ENGLAND BYGONES. 

from a grass-grown summit the underlying 
sods of an old structure. He paced it for me, 
and told me where were its pulpit, its door, 
and its towers. He rebuilt for me this quaint 
house into the tamed landscape. One cannot 
at this day well appreciate the heroism of that 
armed devotion. It is easier to imagine how 
dazed one of the old watchmen would be to 
find himself suddenly resurrected upon his 
tower, with no foe to fight against. 

When the Indians had passed away the 
meeting-houses were still, for convenience, 
centrally located ; and, being used by a whole 
township, were often far away from any habi- 
tation. Later, however, the isolated meeting- 
house, with its " God's acre," was deserted. 
Population increased, villages sprang up, and 
new places of worship were built to meet the 
growing means and needs of the people. The 
old burial-grounds began to seem too far away 
and too lonely for the beloved dead. Village 
people chose to lay them in some spot near by, 
which was fenced carefully out and adorned 
with trees and shrubs. At the same time the 
thrifty farmer set aside a spot in some field, 
apt to be the most conspicuous point on his 
farm. 

Meanwhile the deserted plat, sown thick 
with the bones of Christian pioneers, was 



THE BURIAL-PLACE. 105 

taken up and cared for by nature. Tradition 
clung to it, ghosts haunted it, vegetation ran 
riot over it, its walls tumbled, its stones were 
zigzag, it was ragged and uneven and wild, 
but beautiful. It lay upon the landscape a 
legend of the past, whether you read it in its 
rude inscriptions or in the gray desolateness 
of its aspect. It came to be known as " the 
old graveyard," — something incorporated into 
the history and atmosphere of the place; a 
solemn suburb, in the sentiment of which 
every villager had an inherited or acquired 
possession. 

A mile away from a ^ew England village, 
on the edge of a primeval forest, by the side 
of a deserted highway, have lain undisturbed 
for years the bones of its patriarchs. Here 
was once a meeting-house, but so long ago 
that nothing but tradition tells of its site. 
This meetino^-house doubtless had its towers 
and its watchers; but the thing itself, and 
the actors in it, have literally gone back to 
dust. Only the undying beauty of the land- 
scape remains, which embodies in it the an- 
cient burial-place. This is almost surrounded 
by a pine forest, and is only separated by the 
thread of a grass-grown path from a beautiful 
lake. It is one of the sweetest spots I ever 
knew ; and if a patch of earth can be sacred 

8 



106 ^^W ENGLAND BYGONES. 

to the memory of the dead, this is made so by 
the dedication of munificent nature. The site 
of it, with that of the meeting-house, contrary 
to custom in troublous times, lies low. The 
shimmering little pond must have been de- 
lightful to the pioneers of the unbroken wil- 
derness. Its shores can be but little changed 
from what they were in the days of the old 
meeting-house, for the pine-trees of its encir- 
cling forest seem as ancient as time itself. 
Were the pines, without undergrowth, and 
the pond and the highways good for strategic 
purposes, or were the builders of this ancient 
house beguiled by the exceeding beauty of 
the landscape? Three Indians, after a hard 
struggle, were once killed upon this pond, 
and the meeting-house outlived their race ; 
so I suppose the old savage drama was played 
out in it. Long sermons were preached; guns 
were stacked by its doorway; and up in its 
towers stood men, whose eyes never turned 
away from the road, the pond, and the pines. 
Of all the tragic and historic life of the spot, 
w^e have left only this forsaken burial-place. 

Kow and then a traveller, drawn by the 
shimmering of the little pond through the 
trees, follows the by-road which leads to it. 
He stoops down, pulls apart tangled weeds 
and grass, and tries to spell out some of its 



THE BURIAL-PLAOE. 107 

time-worn inscriptions. He finds the deeply- 
cut name of the last pastor of the church, and 
of scores of other ancient and godly men. 
What he fails to decipher are manifold texts 
of Scripture and verses of old hymns, quaintly 
spelled and lettered. This now illegible stone- 
script was once tenderly illustrative of the 
virtues of the underlying dead. I recall, as 
if it were but yesterday, the last burial in 
that old church-yard ; the rude bier ; the 
procession of villagers following after the 
mourners ; the sunshine and the silence of 
the day. The train wound slowly through 
the forest, by the pond, into the church-yard. 
There was no rattling of hearse and coaches ; 
no crowd of gazers in holiday attire. It was 
a carrying of the dead with simple, solemn 
ceremony to the grave. The bier was set 
down ; the villagers stood around it; and then 
the minister, with bared head, said, reverently, 
" Let us pray." His voice went through the 
old wood, across the pond, and seemed to fill 
all space. 

I know of no service more beautiful and 
impressive than a village funeral of olden 
times. I have been to many such, and each 
stands out in memory like a painting. The 
bereavement of one villager was the grief of 
every other. Silence and sorrow fell over 



108 ^EW ENGLAND BYGONES. 

them all. The presence of the dead hallowed 
a house. Hard-working women crowded in, 
and grew gentle and beautiful with sympathy. 
Bronzed men, with hands calloused by toil, 
lifted and folded the rusty pall as lightly as if 
it had been of gossamer. The preacher, stand- 
ing upon the threshold of the " best room," 
filled the house with his simple words ; hymns 
were sung reverently by untrained voices; 
relatives took a last look of their dead; neigh- 
bors followed after them ; the lid was ham- 
mered down with that mournful stroke once 
heard never forgotten ; the coarse-handed, 
warm-hearted men lifted the coffin as ten- 
derly as they had handled the pall, and car- 
ried it outside where the bier waited to receive 
it. The house was hushed as it passed out, 
and the procession, called out by some neigh- 
bor, noiselessly formed behind it. 

What a terrible passing out that is, — the 
going forth of a dead body never to return ! 
Hope goes forth with the most forlorn de- 
parture of a living friend. Sickness, distance, 
time, all leave room for desire and expecta- 
tion ; death never ! We cannot know our 
loss until our dead have left us. The presence 
of the lifeless body gives us a measure of con- 
solation. It awes us by the symmetry of its 
marble beauty. The utter peace and silence 



THE BURIAL-PLACE. 109 

which possess it steal also into us, and we sit 
comforted in the presence of our dead. But 
oh ! who can measure the utter agony of that 
hour when they go from us for all time, borne 
out unresisting, to be forevermore things of 
the past ? If we call out to them, their own lips 
are dumb. Stretching out our arms for them, 
their own are bound and move not. Turning 
back to the desolated household, what utter 
emptiness is there, silence and darkness and 
nothingness where was fulness and brightness 
and presence ! ^o echo of a voice in the air; 
no footfall; never so light a touch of the 
hand; gone, utterly gone; henceforth to be 
slipping farther and farther away from the 
treacherous hold of memory. 

After a funeral the people were apt to 
linger, dropping oiF one by one, each to his 
own way and work; only relatives and near 
friends staying to sit down to unrelished 
baked meats. The bier, flinging out its fan- 
tastic arms, always marked the newest-made 
grave, and stayed upon it until transferred to 
that of a later comer. 

I have listened hours to a village necrology 
from the lips of an old woman, who never 
missed the date of a funeral, nor forgot the 
way the wind blew on the day of it, or the 
meats the mourners ate. Her tales, told mostly 



110 ^£!W ENGLAND BYGONES. 

in rude rhyme, were ludicrously minute, yet 
simple and touching. It was like the unroll- 
ing of a panorama of scenes, rough, perhaps, 
and sharply sketched by few lines, but most 
admirable for truth and power. Tender tra- 
ditions, quaint old customs, you are all a part 
of the treasures of bygone days. 



CHAPTEE YIIL 



HANNAH AND JONATHAN. 



There were '' hired men" and " hired 
women," but no servants, in my grandfather's 
day. These "hired" men and women were 
the sons and daughters of respectable farmers, 
who had simply transferred themselves into 
more prosperous homes than their own. There 
was no degradation in the change. Hard 
labor was the birthright of the average farm- 
er's boy, and he cared little whether he 
drudged upon his father's farm or upon that 
of a neighbor. The girl who was neat and 
thrifty at home made a neat and thrifty 
" help," and as such she had her reward in a 
good name and kindly treatment. Her pay 
was very small as wages are now reckoned, 
but ample for the needs of her time. Her 
dress was suited to her calling. In winter it 
was of homespun woollen ; in summer it was 
of strong gingham, also home-made, but far 
prettier than the winter garment. The threads 
of the latter, spun in long winter evenings 



112 NEW ENGLAND BYGONES. 



and dyed in the chimney-corner, made sombre, 
unbecoming stuffs. The ginghams, fancifully 
checked with blue or yellow, were the product 
of the flax-field. The rustic weaver, sitting in 
the sunshine on summer days, skilfully plied 
her shuttle, and from the seeming entangle- 
ment of white threads with blue and yellow 
and brown, rolled off from the beam of her 
loom an admirable web. It was clean-look- 
ing and strong, and into the making of it had 
gone some of the farm's most precious prod- 
ucts. Underlying its texture were the dainty 
blue blossoms of the flax-bed, and skill and 
judgment had been brought to bear upon each 
of the many processes of its handling. 

The garments made from it would now seem 
as quaint as the web itself. Hannah always 
wore when working about the house a long, 
broad apron, with gathered bib, tied at the 
neck and waist with strings. In winter this 
was of blue mixed cotton and wool cloth, and 
in summer of the checked blue or yellow and 
white gingham. It was an inseparable part of 
her working attire, a true servant's costume, 
as peculiar and becoming to her vocation as 
the peasant dress of any other country. 

This Hannah, the " hired girl" of my grand- 
father, was a representative one. Her beha- 
vior was as befitting her station as her dress. 



HANNAH AND JONATHAN. 113 

Despite the seeming equality of her position 
in the household, she Avas utterly honest, 
patient, faithful, and respectful. She never 
changed her place, and she spun and wove 
and knit and stitched her strength into the 
fabrics of the house until her hair grew gray 
and her eyes dim in its service. Long rule 
made my grandmother somewhat hard, and 
she was liable to exact from Hannah, as a 
right, that labor which she had first bought as 
a privilege. The lifelong serving-woman, by 
running in her narrow groove year after year, 
had become a sort of machine, and her mistress 
had learned to expect the unfailing working of 
it. The relation was not a tender one, but it was 
honest and respectable. In the soil of that ]N'ew 
England life the pan lay close to the surface. 

Such servants as Hannah were often sought 
in marriage by hard-working young farmers. 
They made faithful, thrifty wives, and their 
houses were scrupulously neat. They only 
shifted one drudgery for another, but in their 
own humble homes pride was added to the 
patience which they wove into the webs of 
their employers. 

The neighbors talked of Hannah as having 
been a good-looking lass, but when Benny and 
I first knew her she was much the worse for 
wear. Still her faded gray eyes looked kindly 



114 iV^TF ENGLAND BYGONES. 

upon US and we loved her. l^obody seemed 
to think that Hannah had grown old. Her 
name and her virtues were a perennial posses- 
sion of the house and the neighborhood. She 
was always called " Hannah." Her dress and 
her ways never changed. "What went to make 
up " Hannah" was the same through all years. 
By this the people knew her. The more un- 
kindly time treated her body the more valued 
" Hannah" became. The serving-woman grew 
lean and wrinkled and ugly, but " Hannah" 
grew venerable and beloved. There was about 
her a certain magnetism which ignored station. 
This humble serving-woman, this " Hannah" 
in her homespun tyre, filled with wild herbs 
and roots, carried healing with her to sick 
neighbors. She was so gentle that she was 
more welcome than her mistress. In that 
household into Avhich death had come Hannah 
was sure to be. The softness of her voice and 
touch and step brought consolation with them. 
There was something in her life that preached, 
— that great faith which she had borne with 
her from childhood, and which she plainly 
shaped into simple words, — that utter self-sac- 
rifice which clothed her like a garment, and 
put out of sight all that was homely about her. 
The sympathy she offered fell like balm where 
wiser speech failed. 



HANNAH AND JONATHAN. 115 

Hannah had queer ways. She was given to 
interior adornments, and the fruits of her 
needlework were thick in the house. These 
were not fine, but considerins: the material 
from which she wrought them, and the time 
aiid patience which she gave to them, they 
were worthy of praise. She pinned black 
broadcloth cats to the wall, brought out in 
silhouette upon red flannel. As portraits they 
w^ere failures, and little Benny was always say- 
ing to her that he was sure he had never seen 
any cats like them. She hung novel comb- 
cases under all the bedroom looking-glasses. 
These w^ere of varied shapes and materials, 
some of broadcloth, some of straw, and less 
pretentious ones of covered pasteboard, all 
much stitched with colored silks. The patch- 
work about the house was endless. Hannah 
hoarded scraps of silk and cambric, and pieced 
them together into pin-balls, chair-cushions, 
and coverlets. She glued painted pictures to 
the inside of wide-mouthed glass jars, which 
she filled with flour and planted with aspara- 
gus, thus simulating quaint vases. She em- 
bossed blown egg-shells with the pith of bul- 
rushes, coiled round bits of bright silk, and 
hung them upon pine boughs in the fireplaces 
of the front rooms. Homely handiwork, but 
well seasoned with the true flavor of rustic life. 



116 NEW ENGLAND BYGONES. 

Her best taste she gave to her flowers. She 
had never read a book on flower-culture ; her 
lessons had come from woodland, pasture, and 
field. From her earliest childhood she had 
been used to blossoms, bright and sweet and 
growing just where they ought to grow. Her 
scarlet poppies set off the Southern-wood bed, 
hop-vines hid the ragged garden-wall, and lilies 
and rose-bushes ran riot in corners. She had 
her bachelor's buttons and marigolds and pinks, 
and a host of other common flowers, crowded 
against beets and carrots and parsnips, wher- 
ever she could get a chance for them. They 
ran parallel on both sides with the broad, 
middle garden-walk, flanked the edges of side- 
beds, and faced their outermost paths with a 
fringe of sweetness. Coming up two-leaved 
and tiny, they had a hard fight against my 
grandfather's and Jonathan's hoes ; but they 
throve nevertheless, and ripened into the 
bloom and fragrance of the garden. 

Lilac-bushes straggled about unpruned, and 
were troublesomely prolific. Forty years ago 
they stood compactly by the doorsteps and 
under the windows of most well-to-do farmers' 
houses, from their toughness and brightness 
fit country shrubs. The grateful, abundant 
thing took kindly to any earth, to any loca- 
tion, climbing out of shade into sunshine, 



HANNAH AND JONATHAN. 117 

spreading rapidly in bright places, a good 
worker, and long suffering of ill usage. I 
remember one, shut into the angle of a tall 
fence, which, although most dense of foliage, 
was the grief of my early childhood, becaus*e 
of its barrenness; but which, the very first 
spring it reached the topmost board, was purple 
with blossoms. 

Hannah's rose-bushes never had any pruning, 
save what nature gave them. Old stocks died 
down, and new ones came in their stead. 
They seemed always to be dying and coming 
to life again. They were unmercifully knocked 
about and trampled upon by spring workers ; 
hens burrowed through their roots; and yet 
they always came out every spring as good as 
new, and bore the largest and sweetest of 
roses. I do not see such roses now, so full of 
scent, so deep-dyed, as the double damask and 
white ones which blossomed in my grand- 
father's garden. It seems as if they must 
have gotten their strength from the rugged 
soil. The damask ones were like peonies for 
size, and their bushes, thick with full-blown 
flowers and buds, in every stage of opening, 
were only surpassed for beauty by those of 
the creamy- white rose, which were as soft- 
tinted as the first blush of dawn, and daintily- 
scented as the quickening breath of spring. 



118 ^EW ENGLAND BYGONES. 

Hannah's flowers were all sweet-smelling, 
gracious, hardj, grateful things. Her pinks 
were marvels for color and scent. Her bach- 
elor's buttons, blue and purple and white, per- 
fumed the morning. Her columbines, wild 
denizens of the garden, kept always a wood- 
land flavor. They got mixed and unsettled as 
to color, but held fast their untamed nature. 

The pride of the garden were the two peony 
roots, just inside the gate on either side. They 
were amongst the earliest comers in spring, 
peeping up out of the brown mould with their 
great crimson leaf-buds, which speedily thrust 
up into strong stocks, to be the bearers of as 
many blossoms. How those peonies grew ! 
ITew stocks came up every year, and each new 
stock seemed to bring with it a peony heavier 
and deeper-dyed than before. Jonathan tied 
them up every season ; but still they waxed 
bigger and bigger, until a barrel hoop would 
not hold them. They were the envy of all the 
children, and the admiration of farmers' wives. 

Poor unlettered Hannah, so patient in her 
round of homely toil, so fond of flowers, had 
an untaught delight in beautiful things. Tread- 
ing with weary feet her toilsome way, she 
transmuted the joys and sorrows and stinted 
incidents of her homely life into pure gold; 
and making the most of her meagre chances. 



HANNAH AND JONATHAN. 119 

has compelled me to remember her not so 
much by what she was as by what she might 
have been. We can never rate a person justly 
until we have disentangled the story of his or 
her life from the impetus or hindrance given 
to it by fortune. What Hannah was I know ; 
what she might have been is suggested by her 
largeness of heart and sweetness of instinct. 
With proper scope here this serving-woman 
might have been a lady. Who shall say now 
that she was not a lady ; and that what she was 
equal to, and got not in this life, she is in 
eternity finding in full measure ? 

But Jonathan. Ah, Jonathan ! what shall 
I say of thee ? The first sight I had of thee, 
thou wast sitting in the old market-wagon, 
smoking and cross-legged. When I last saw 
thee, thou wast sitting in the miller's door, still 
smoking and cross-legged. Unshaven, un- 
shorn, with nose, chin, and cheeks all awry, 
his nether garments shrinking from his blue 
hosen, his bristly hair standing out from his 
weather-worn hat, Jonathan lounged on the 
low stoop, puffing away at his pipe, joking 
with " Molly" and the miller, and interlarding 
his slow talk with many a " yaw" and " wall." 

Yet, with all his uncouthness of person, 
dress, and dialect, he was a true Jonathan, 
honest, self-reliant, hard-working, kind even 



120 ^^W ENGLAND BYGONES. 

to gentleness. He was tender of children, 
and merciful to all dumb creatures. When a 
young lamb chanced to stray from the fold, it 
was Jonathan who stayed out two-thirds of 
the chilly autumn night until he had found it, 
and then nursed it until it was strong again. 
" Grood Jonathan," said little Benny, in the 
wanderings of his sickness. " Good Jonathan," 
echoes my heart after many years. 



CHAPTER IX. 



THE WEEKLY ROUTINE. 



They lived at my grandfather's just as most 
of the well-to-do ISTew England farmers lived 
forty years ago. On Monday morning, long 
before sunrise, my grandmother and Han- 
nah would be busy before two steaming tubs 
in the long parch. By this early start they 
got the freshness of the morning. The sun 
came up from behind the distant hills, lifted 
shadows from the woodland, mist from the 
valley, and cast a shimmer upon the dew- 
covered fields. It streamed through the porch- 
door, across the floor, past the washers, and 
exalted what was a little while before only the 
dull aspect of labor to a share of the bright- 
ness of the morning. There is a transient 
time between the uprising of the sun from the 
horizon and its full possession of the land- 
scape, in which there is a sort of pictorial 
aspect of the meeting of day with night, which 
is exg^uisitely beautiful. Only the country- 
liver can fully feel it — this dying of night 

9 121 



122 ^^W ENGLAND BYGONES. 

with the birth of day — this supreme moment 
when the mists and dimness and low voices of 
the one exhale into the melody and brightness 
of the other. It is a daily miracle — this sud- 
den transition from gray to rosy light — this 
unrolling of the dew-covered landscape — this 
assumption, in delicious crescendo, of sound 
— this quickening of the day's life over the 
sleep of night — this flying of darkness, as of 
a ghost pursued, before the flooding of light 
— this oldest of all stories again told. Awake, 
for the day has dawned ! 

In those days women washed who went to 
church in brocades and satins. They used no 
machinery, there was no bleaching-powder 
nor blueing in their tubs, and yet their linen 
came out, as Hannah used to say to my grand- 
mother, " as white as the driven snow." These 
two Avomen kept time at their scrubbing, and 
in the early morning, when they were fresh, 
hummed psalm tunes together. They were 
not belittled by this labor, but by their efiici- 
ency and content they gave dignity to it. It 
may have broadened their hands, — I am sure 
it did their chests, — but they accepted, with 
the utmost willingness, these clumsy and neces- 
sary toils of their living. How I longed to 
plunge my arms into the foaming, sparkling, 
rainbow-tinted suds, in spite of Hannah's 



THE WEEKLY ROUTINE. 123 

bleached, parboiled fingers ! When Jona- 
than had carried the tubs to the well for the 
final rinsing of the linen, it was my care after- 
w^ards to keep Betsy, the old horse, from 
walking under it, flapping snow-white upon 
the line. Those washing-days were some of 
the best play-days and dream-days of my 
childhood. Who can number the bubbles of 
both suds and brain which have sparkled and 
floated away in the atmosphere of their quaint 
surroundings ? 

The east-porch door was, my grandmother 
said, "a sightly place." Far away on the 
horizon, between two hills, nestled a small 
hamlet. The deep valley below was dense 
with an old forest, from which a' belt of green 
fields arose and fell again to make a bed for 
the mill-stream, down to which stretched my 
grandfather's broad acres. The mill and the 
roof of the miller's red cottage were just in 
sight, and the clatter of wheels and the bab- 
bling of waters were pleasant to hear. Around 
the corner one caught a glimpse of the brook 
where Molly, the miller's daughter, bleached 
her linen, and Jonathan loitered with her 
when his day's work was done. Farther on 
was Benny's little grave. 

In that porch-door I used to sit and dream 
away the day, listening to the harmless talk of 



124 ^EW ENGLAND BYGONES. 

the washers, who never let a traveller go un- 
heeded on the highway. What innocent gos- 
sip it was, as I hear it now, whispering through 
the years ! " Where is the parson going this 
early ?" " Who can be sick now ? the doctor 
is riding like the wind." " I shouldn't think 
Mrs. Brown could spare Sally for school to- 
day." Thus one by one the wayfarers went 
by, and the washers watched and babbled 
until they grew tired with their work, and so 
unobservant and silent. 

Twice a week, with much method and little 
bustle, quantities of butter and cheese were 
made ready for the market. The unctuous 
odor of those tasks comes back to me, and I 
still taste the all-pervading flavor of the cheese- 
room. I see the clumsy press, trickling with 
sour juices, the polished wooden bowls, the 
rows of shining pans set out to scald in the 
sunshine, mistress and maid, in checked home- 
spun aprons, shaping the golden butter or cut- 
ting the tender curd. Dear, simple-hearted 
women ! your work was the common task of a 
farmer's household, but you made it seem like 
a pastime by the skill you brought to bear upon 
it. It might have been drudgery in other 
hands, but in yours it only showed how little 
the dignity of labor depends upon what one 
does, and how much upon the way in which 



THE WEEKLY ROUTINE. 125 

tasks are taken up. Untoward accidents 
sometimes happened. The cream would not 
give up its butter, or the cheese cracked in 
turning, mishaps dreaded by skilful dairy- 
women. Old ^ance, who lived in the edge 
of the wood, beyond the miller's cottage, 
was supposed to bewitch farmer's cows to the 
spoiling of their products, without mercy, and 
many a farmhouse door had nailed upon its 
lintel a horseshoe as a charm against. her plot- 
tings. If there was any virtue in them the 
old woman lay down often at night with un- 
easy bones. Old I^Tance was a" forlorn, crazed 
creature, whose early history had been dropped 
out of speech, and who throve best in her half- 
savage woodland life. The farmers added to 
the pittance which the selectmen grudgingly 
gave her, so that she never suiFered for food or 
clothing. Every ambition had died out of 
her. She seemed to have but one vestige of 
humanity left, and that was her affection for 
the living things in the woods about her. 
Birds were always hovering over her hut, and 
in winter the snow around it was thick with 
footprints of untamed creatures which had 
come to pick up the crumbs she had pinched 
for them from her poverty. ISTothing could be 
more repulsive than this haggard old woman, 
crouching over her embers in her one-roomed 



126 ^EW ENGLAND BYGONES. 

hut, or groping mth a faded shawl over her 
head for fagots amongst the white snow of the 
forest. She was a hlot upon the landscape, 
this waif of humanity stranded alongside the 
purity of domestic life. 

Uncouth old safe, dearer to my grandmother 
than costly bric-a-brac to modern fine lady, no- 
body seems to make nowadays such cheeses 
as bulged out your canvas sides, prettily mot- 
tled with tansy or wholesome yarrow, and 
crumbling under the knife when cut. They 
had a toothsome way of dissolving in the 
mouth, and tickling the palate with a pleasant 
tingle. The fine grain of the products of my 
grandmother's dairy might have been due to 
the fineness of her own texture. I have more 
often tasted far coarser results from like mate- 
rial. Hers looked and tasted like the work of 
a lady. 

The heavy labor of the day over, and the 
hearth swept and scrubbed, my grandmother 
and Hannah, who were never idle, sat down 
to their mending, or the one went to her dis- 
taff" and the other to her weaving. My grand- 
mother was never handsomer than she was 
when sitting by her little flax-wheel, with a 
handkerchief of white muslin about her neck, 
her snow-white hair drawn under her plain 
cap, and the rosy sunlight of the waning day 



THE WEEKLY ROUTINE. 127 

falling across her faded face and still fine fig- 
ure. Upon her also fell, like a benediction, 
that soft-tinted later beauty which is the in- 
heritance of vigorous, ripe old age. Hannah, 
glorified by the same sunlight, played her 
plainer part, and sat by her wheel or at her 
loom, her attire and mien adjusted to her sta- 
tion with a sino^ular fitness. 

The clatter of the loom in the chamber and 
the wdiizzing of the flax-wheel below made a 
constant hum of industry in the old farm- 
house. Much wool was also spun, and the 
moaning of the big wheel was the saddest 
sound of my childhood. It was like a low 
wail from out the lengthened monotony of the 
spinner's life. I used to stop my ears against 
it, and many a time have run down to the 
woodland to get away from its painful persist- 
ence. The same wail, taking other shapes, 
has followed me ever since, and after all there 
is to every life, even the seemingly most for- 
tunate, a deep undertone of complaint and re- 
sistance. 

My grandmother's little flax- wheel was a 
gossipy thing, whirring away at rac}^ bits of 
news falling from the lips of demure old ladies 
in broad frilled caps and square neckerchiefs. 
How like they had all grown by walking in 
the same rut all their days ! The only indi- 



128 ^^W ENGLAND BYGONES. 

vidual flavor about them seemed to lie in the 
diverse figures on their snuff-box covers, and 
the varied stitchings of their goose-quill knit- 
ting-sheaths. How they talked and knit, and 
knit and talked, with tireless tongues, putting 
in marks at their narro wings; slowly shaping 
their socks with oft-repeated measurings ! Upon 
one of them, flighty Huldah, I lookback with 
peculiar liking. She was a full-blooded little 
gossip, the kindest of mischief-makers. Every- 
thing about her, her dried-up, sinewy flgure, 
snapping gray eyes and shrill voice, her yawn- 
ing calash, huge reticule, and broad pocket 
were in keeping with her calling. Everybody 
was glad to see Huldah's blue cotton umbrella 
bobbing up and down upon the highway ; and 
no crone was surer than she of light rolls and 
a strong cup of tea. She always carried an 
umbrella through rain or shine because, she 
once confidingly whispered to little Benny, 
she was "just the least bit flighty in the upper 
story." She was particular about the quality 
of her snuff, and most generous with it. The 
cow on the cover of her box was the delight 
of all youngsters. Flighty though she was, 
she had, Jonathan said, "an uncommon taking 
way with her." She praised the farmers' crops 
and the gudewives' linen. She had a gift of 
making you pleased with yourself. I can hear 



THE WEEKLY ROUTINE. 129 

her now, " They du say, Jonathan, that Molly 
is just the peertest and pootiest gal in town. 
Lors nie ! Hannah, you can du more work than 
any other gal." She was most excellent in 
sickness, — endless in patience, and a sleepless 
watcher. There was a charm in the very click 
of her needles, which seemed to keep time 
with the blinking of her eyes. I was sure, 
though, that many of her stitches were false 
ones, and Hannah held her stockings in high 
contempt. Her true hold upon the patience 
and affections of the people lay in that very 
flightiness of which she was so pathetically 
conscious, — an infirmity which never fails to 
touch the sympathy of the rudest people. She 
professed to live with her brother, although 
her true abiding-place was with her towns- 
people at large. Her unbidden coming always 
brought them good. The charities of her 
simple heart were as broad and healing as if 
her brain had been stronger, and the draft 
she made upon their pity came back to them 
in kindly acts. ^N'o hearth was ever too 
crowded to take her into its circle ; no hand 
ever too busy to grasp hers in welcome. So 
this half-crazy woman, chattering and laughing 
with a wild wit, with no single external grace 
to commend her, through the mystic way of 
humanity passed like a beatitude across her 



130 ^EW ENGLAND BYGONES. 

neighbors' thresholds. Her foibles weighed 
with them as gossamer ; but the sweetness of 
her mission stayed after her. Poor Huldah ! 
The first time I left my grandfather's home 
alone her cotton umbrella stood by the door. 
She herself patted me on the head, called me 
a good child, and gave me a piece of dried 
gingerbread out of her snufty reticule. The 
gingerbread I threw into the highway, but the 
quaint picture of the kind-hearted, wandering 
old woman — many years dead, and whom I 
never saw again — I cannot throw away. 

Saturday at my grandfather's brought bak- 
ing, with its morning bustle. Such a hurrying 
and scurrying and sputtering and splashing as 
there was ! For a short space misrule seemed 
to have invaded the household. The big 
oven crackled and roared, whilst Jonathan 
plied it with fuel. Hannah was reckless 
w^ith milk and eggs. My grandmother kept 
up a continued rattling of spoons and pans, 
and I seemed always to be in the way. Grad- 
ually materials took shape. The fire died dow^n 
in the oven; Jonathan cleared and swept it, 
and shut it up. Shortly it was opened and 
tried, and then packed with pots and pans and 
plates, close up to the brim. Doughnuts sizzled 
and steamed in the big pot on the crane, and 
the scent of food, cooked and uncooked, was 



THE WEEKLY ROUTINE. 131 



far-reaching and positive, pleasant and appe- 
tizing. The household, by degrees, settled 
down. The doughnuts were skimmed out 
and the fat set by to cool. The hearth was 
swept ; the floors and tables scrubbed ; soiled 
garments were changed for fresh; and, with 
the twilight, peace seemed to come in through 
doors and windows, — peace to rest upon the 
white heads of aged man and aged woman, 
upon their man-servant and maid-servant, 
and upon the child within their gates. 



CHAPTER X. 



NEIGHBORS. 



1 



The essence of neigliborliness is line-grained. 
Its charity sufFeretli long and is kind ; its hu- 
manity never wearieth ; it is unbound by cus- 
tom ; unbought by price ; a perennial spring ; 
an invaluable gift. Behold in a woman your 
model country neighbor. She is lynx-eyed, 
but not over-curious ; spontaneous, but not 
familiar ; helpful , but not aggressive. She 
takes note of your necessities, which she re- 
lieves without ostentation. So great is her 
generosity of effort that she keeps no account 
in memory of those deeds by which she has 
made you her debtor. If she needs you she 
freely asks of you. She is more reticent of 
her words than her works; and weighs well 
her speech, that by it her social relations may 
not be marred. She is unmoved by impulse 
or prejudice. She may be hard of exterior, 
but tenderness dwells in her. If bidden to a 
feast she goes to it in her best attire, with 
serious dignity; but into the sick-room she 
132 



NEIGHBORS. 133 



glides with unchanged garments, bearing with 
her the healing of herbs, softness of presence, 
and a feeling heart. 

My first-born was buried from a country 
home. His short life had been of no use to 
any one outside of that home. To my neigh- 
bors he had left nothing worthy of remem- 
brance; he had made hardly a ripple upon 
the surface of their quiet lives. He had sim- 
ply come and passed away. Lo ! what was 
wrought by the silent mystery of his death. 
They thronged about him. They touched his 
white garments with exquisite tenderness, and 
let fall upon them tears of pity and love. One 
of them wrapped him in his winding-sheet, 
smoothed his hair prettily, and touched his 
brow with a holy, motherly kiss. 

Beloved country neighbors of another home, 
dear are the memories of your spontaneous 
kindness to me and mine, — you true, tender- 
hearted, free-handed, helpful, bygone neigh- 
bors. Tirzah, Tirzah the good ! you were 
hard-worked and plain ; but you were so 
clothed upon with self-denial, kindness, and 
charity that my children loved you, and you 
were beautiful to them. They never missed 
in you any graces ; to them you were pure ' 
gold. Dear old woman ! when your weary 
feet shall pass over to the shining shore, two, 



134 ^^W ENGLAND BYGONES. 

I am sure, will gladly go down to meet you. 
Kind old Tirzah, may I some time see you in 
the beautiful garments of immortality ! " God 
bless Tirzali !" lisped Marion, in infantile 
speech; and night after night went up this 
simple petition until the child's tongue forgot 
its cunning. 

My grandfather's neighbors were scattered 
over a wide space of country. The nearest 
one of them was half a mile away; but dis- 
tance only seemed to lend zest to their inter- 
course with one another. Lack of diversion 
also gave impulse to it. The drama they all 
helped to play was upon a narrow stage, with 
few acts ; and they, the actors in it, were so 
far apart that each stood out to the others 
most conspicuous for the right or wrong ren- 
dering of his part. Every incident and acci- 
dent of one's daily life was, to his neighbor, 
what his costumes are to the player in the 
theatre, a sort of marking of him. His horse, 
his oxen, his wagon, and his dog identified 
him, like the wearing of a stage garment; 
and all his incomings and outgoings, all the 
ways of his household, were most familiar to 
his townspeople. Sunday noonings made 
neighbors ; the courtesies of hayings and har- 
vestings brought them together; and the leis- 
ure of winter revealed each to the other. They 



NEIGHBORS. 135 



were compelled to be dependent upon, and so 
kind to, one another, — these simple, isolated 
people. They found relief from the restraint 
of labor and the suppression of their working 
days in their holiday garrulousness, and their 
eager recognition of every other man and 
woman as their neighbor. When clad in 
their best suits, with a little respite from toil, 
their whole natures seemed to rebound; and 
silent, stern men became eager chatterers. 
Very simple gossip it was, mainly of herds 
and crops and town affairs. They thronged 
the meeting-house steps on Sundays, gathered 
in knots about the village stores, and never 
failed on the highway to salute one another 
with much speech. The smallest mishap to 
the one was speedily known to the rest, and 
this large recognition came back manifold in 
sympathy. 

Extreme deference was exacted from chil- 
dren to parents, and from youth to old age. 
Amongst the men there was little social assump- 
tion, save that the best thinkers, known as 
such, took unto themselves a certain boldness 
of speech. Their salutations followed custom, 
and their common talk ran in grooves ; but 
the mass of them were as strong in logic as 
their soil was in rock; and they were almost 
as easily turned as the latter from their slow- 



136 ^^W ENGLAND BYGONES. 

formed opinions. They were weather-wise 
almost to accuracy, and foretold to one another 
the coming and shifting of storms. 

l^othing could be quainter upon the highway 
than the meeting in midsummer of two anx- 
ious farmers in their high-hacked wagons. 
They stopped, compared the size and state of 
their exposed crops ; and then fell to watching 
the clouds, each shading his eyes with his hand. 
Hardy, resolute, half-defiant, they had a sort 
of heathen aspect — these sons of and wor- 
shippers of the soil. Their hopes, and so their 
hearts, were bound up in the signs of sun and 
wind and cloud, and they naturally grew into 
such picturesque and harmless idolaters. 

The women of my grandfather's neighbor- 
hood were more given to social distinctions 
than the men. The wives of " forehanded" 
farmers and professional men were apt to be 
somewhat exalted, or, in the speech of the 
times, " looked up to." This was because of 
a partial exemption from toil ; and they lacked 
the intensity, the wild flavor, of those humbler 
women, who threw their whole strength and 
will into their vocations, and thus made them- 
selves worthy of better things. What if these 
latter did seem like drudges, and grow hard 
and ugly to sight; the patience and the power 
and the will to do were still in them, and the 



NEIGHBORS. 137 



price tliey paid for their fidelity gave a pathetic 
nohleness to the sacrifice. 

The women were, as a class, religious. They 
were not emotional, busy, bustling Christians. 
They knew little about missions and Dorcas 
societies.' There was not much poverty to tax 
their sympathies. They were learned in doc- 
trines, firm of faith, and full of a simple rev- 
erence. They were never so fagged or bur- 
dened that they could not, on the Lord's day, 
lay aside their cares and toils, and go up to 
His house. It ought to have been an easy 
thins: for these women to enter into the kins^- 
dom. Their life here was so hard upon them 
that the life to come must have held out to 
their weary souls a picture, beyond all measure 
delightful, of the eternal rest, the everlasting 
peace of the true gospel. 

The meagreness of their lot begot in many 
of them a stinginess about dollars and cents ; 
but the most carnal-minded of them were truly 
reverent on the Lord's day ; and they all en- 
dured^frost-bites and long sermons, in their 
un warmed churches, with a praiseworthy pa- 
tience. Sweet to them was the hush of their 
restful Sabbaths. It was the sio;n and token 
to them of a Sabbath that should never end. 

When their children were young, these an- 
cient mothers had to clothe them with garments 

10 



188 ^EW ENGLAND BYGONE;^. 

spun and woven by their own hands ; and for 
the daughters, as they grew up, table-linen 
and bedding were to be stored away for their 
"fixing out." In m}^ grandmother's day this 
thrifty forecasting of fate was the custom in 
farmers' families, and she was deemed rich to 
whose treasures gifts of silver and china were 
also added. Daughters were expected to marry. 
Marriage brought extra care and toil to a 
woman ; but she did not shrink from that, 
for labor was her lot ; and she of the humbler 
sort, to whom no suitor came, was quite sure 
to take up her narrower vocation as tailoress 
or dressmaker or household servant. It was 
thought to be generous in a farmer to let his 
daughter " learn a trade," thus freeing her 
from the heavier drudgeries of farm-work. 
There must have been cheapened lives, but 
there were, at least, no idle ones amongst these 
women. They began their lustrous webs in 
early girlhood. They accepted their condition 
as they found it ; they did with all their might 
what the Lord gave them to do, and so were 
in their calling true livers. 

The tailoress, with her awkward goose, 
stitching and pressing coarse cloths into 
homely garments, grew gray-haired in the 
service of friendly neighbors. Her meagre 
pay, through long hoarding, rolled up with 



NEIGHBORS. 139 



years. She got to be a house-owner and land- 
owner, and so a woman of repute and weight 
amongst others. Lucy and Hester were two 
such humble neighbors of my grandfather's. 
They were in middle life when I knew them; 
two sisters, to whom their ftxther, in dying, 
had left a life interest in his house and estate. 
This was the usual way in those days of pro- 
viding for the old age of unmarried daughters ; 
not the most safe or generous way for them, 
but consistent with their trainins; and habits 
of self-reliance. With health, they were sure 
to be self-supporting, and in sickness and old 
age they would be cared for, grudgingly it 
might be, in the rooms set apart for them in 
the old homestead. 

Lucy and Hester might have well dreaded 
any possible dependence upon their brother, a 
crabbed, morose man, whose surly nature 
seemed to infect his home and all its sur- 
roundings. It was a dismal, joyless-looking 
house. Seen from a distance, it had a most 
inhospitable look, unsoftened by any green, 
growing thing, uncorniced, unpainted, grim, 
cold, forbidding. The room of Lucy and 
Hester seemed to catch all the sunshine lying 
about it. Their goose was always pounding 
at seams, their tongues were always going in 
concert, and they were the busiest, cheeriest, 



140 ^EW ENGLAND BYGONES. 

plumpest, most prosperous of old maids. 
They had money in the hank; how much no 
one knew, hut rumor added to it faster than 
their nimhle fingers could ever have earned it, 
until they came to he esteemed rich women. 
People wondered why they had never mar- 
ried, for they were fair-faced and womanly, 
and full of lovahleness in their low deg-ree. 
They Avere fond of children, and took several 
little hoys to hring up, hut somehow these all 
turned out hadly. One stole some of their 
hard-earned money, another tried to hurn 
their house. People said the sisters were too 
easy with them. It may he, after all, that 
they had fallen upon their true vocation, and 
that they were jollier and more useful with 
their goose in hand than they would have 
he en as wives and mothers. 

Joseph their hrother did not mar their com- 
fort much, for they were not in his power. 
His wife died early of overwork, leaving her 
tasks and her discomforts as an inheritance 
to her daughter. This daughter, Ahigail hy 
name, was a tall, thin, hut sweet- faced girl, 
who, when I first saw her, was drudging her 
life out for her cruel father. She had a lover 
in a well-to-do farmer from the next town, 
hut she never married. The linen was all 
spun and woven and packed away ; the hridal 



NEIGHBORS. 141 



dress was made ready, and then, one June da}^, 
she who was to have worn it was borne out 
to the family burial-place. 

Not long after the father died suddenly and 
unmourned. Then Lucy and Hester came 
into full possession of the farm. They took 
down the little sign ^' Tailoring done here" 
from their window, planted lilacs^ and rose- 
bushes about the house, and trained a creeper 
over the front door. They did not make many 
changes, but somehow the dismal look went 
out of the place, and the cheer, which before 
was confined to their own one room, now 
seemed to pervade the whole house. They 
were become, for the country, truly rich 
women; but, from force of habit, they kept 
basting and stitching and pressing until their 
goose grew too heavy for them. Then, from 
beino: the two tailoresses who worked about 
the town, they passed into the two cheerful 
old sisters, whose serene latter years and calm 
end were a rest and a lesson to their weary 
neighbors. 

Yery faithful to each other in their marriage 
relations were these ancient men and women. 
They were given neither to sentiment nor dem- 
onstration. The women promised to honor 
and obey their husbands ; and they did honor 
and obey them, not with weak servility but 



142 ^EW ENGLAND BYGONES. 



witli trust and willingness. The twain were 
truly yoked together to bear life's burdens ; 
and, working side by side, year after year, 
they grew to be most helpful and needful and 
dear to each other. Theirs may not have been 
the highest type of marriage, but such as it 
was it made each a necessity to the other, and 
whatever it lacked in grace and beauty it made 
up in truth and stability. If there was in it 
any actual or implied degradation of woman, 
this was shown in the preference of sons over 
daughters in the disposition of their small 
estates. The thrift and " fixing out" of the 
latter were thought to be sufficient for them, 
and the farm with its belongings was given to 
the sons. As a subject of contemplation, as 
a Sabbath picture divorced from toil, the pas- 
toral, patriarchal life of one of these ancient 
families has a Biblical aspect, — something of 
the sweetness and simplicity of those histori- 
cal households of Abraham and Isaac and 
Jacob. It was the life of a race of strong- 
minded, heroic. Christian laborers, who, from 
a substratum of mental, moral, and religious 
strength, sent forth a stream of migration as 
potent as the rivers which take their rise from 
the granite rock of their farms. If the women 
had been put forward forty years, many of 
them would have lost what now seem their 



NEIGHBORS, 143 



peculiarities, and with them their chief charm, 
under the weight of what we call our superior 
civilization. But there was a certain class, 
small in numher as it always is, Avhom no time 
nor circumstance could have spoiled. They 
were nohle women, — women full of all man- 
ner of well-doing; fair to look upon, with the 
beatitudes stamped upon their features as upon 
the pages of a written book; women who, 
walking in their humble condition, meek and 
lowly, came to be looked upon as in a measure 
sanctified, and were called "mothers in Israel." 
Their faces, set heavenward, cling to memory 
like the portraits of painted madonnas. 

Other women there were, more worldly wise, 
under whose cunning hands the plainer women 
of the neighborhood were as potter's clay, — my 
grandmother was of such, — sensible, handsome 
women, whom no measure of labor could be- 
little, — full of magnetism and power and wide 
influence. 

The stories of many of these ancient home- 
workers, written out, would be so many leaves 
from that pioneer, formative life which so em- 
bellishes and enriches the early history of N'ew 
England. They were home missionaries, who 
gave to their neighbors their unsalaried labor, 
and to posterity the fruits of their wide-sown 
humanities and Christian graces. I have seen 



144 ^^W ENGLAND BYGONES. 

a whole village uplifted by the superior nature 
of a single grand, thinking, faithful. Christian 
woman. She was the wife of a poorly-paid 
country minister. Her home was meagre, hut 
her love of beauty great. She was not there- 
fore poor, for what the country could give to 
any woman it gave to her. Her field seemed 
narrow, for her ability was large ; but if her 
standard of living overreached that of her 
neighbors, her example stimulated their chil- 
dren to higher effort. Her mission was pecu- 
liar. Analyzed, its integral parts were small, 
in its aggregate not greatly recognized at the 
time, afterwards felt. The life of this well- 
poised woman, wide in creative power but 
narrow-gauged by circumstance, in aspect 
bare, in actual experience full of the sadness 
of suppression, went day by day into the 
children about her, and that scope which was 
denied to herself she helped to give through 
them to their posterity. 

She was neither stranded nor martyred. It 
was her vocation that, because of the nobility 
of her nature, she should, shape those who 
copied after her. It was her lot that the self- 
sacrifice which was engrafted upon her other 
virtues should give to her life a pensive 
beauty; that she should better others by a 
certain impoverishment of self. What she 



NEIGHBORS. 145 



longed for and got not, guided by her, others 
found. Her glory was that her true being was 
not bound by circumstance. She was not sim- 
ply a village woman, she was a citizen of the 
world, for in giving wider sphere to others, 
she was only committing to them that part of 
her higher life most worthy to be developed 
and remembered. 



CHAPTER XL 



SUNDAY. 



Dear, delicious, bygone country Sabbaths, 
how out of harmony bustle and striving 
seemed with your days ! A woman minding 
her dairy or a farmer storing his hay made a 
scandal, and a certain decorous dignity was 
given to necessary labor. How the aspect of 
the landscape changed with the ending of tlie 
week's tasks! Individual life tells in the 
country. Farmers digging in their fields, 
dairywomen busy before their doors, loitering 
children, working oxen, all motions begotten 
of labor are greatly missed when withdrawn. 
The stillness of the Sabbath at my grand- 
father's was almost oppressive. ^N'ot a worker 
was to be seen, hardly a loiterer, only the 
silent processes of nature went on in the de- 
serted fields. There was something sublime 
in this universal ovation of quiet to the sacred- 
ness of the day, in this giving to the Sabbath 
that full possession of rest ordained for it 
in its old creation. It was the instinct of a 
146 



SUNDA Y. 147 



primitive and pure devotion, the spiritual ex- 
pression of a people who knew of no compro- 
mise with duty. The keeping of the Lord's 
day meant with them a giving up of all work- 
day pursuits. The thoughts of many of them 
may have run in profane channels, but if so 
they gave no outward sign. If they forecasted 
to themselves plans for the coming week, they 
told not of it, and the most eager worker of 
them all fell readily into the subdued spirit of 
the day. 

The farmers used to sit much by the win- 
dows of their living-rooms and look com- 
placently over their fields. No wonder they 
loved their lands, for these had given back, for 
yearly care and toil, an hundred-fold in health 
and delight. I seem to see the old miller, 
ready for meeting, lounging in a rush-bot- 
tomed chair outside his little red cottage under 
the hill. The mill has stopped its clatter, 
Molly loiters with her pitcher at the spring, 
and the gray old house-dog lies on the door- 
stone snapping at flies in the sunshine. The 
minutest feature of that Sunday morning pic- 
ture comes back to me : the lazy drone of the 
bees about the hive under the cherry-tree ; the 
row of sunflowers close by the garden-fence, 
tilting their faces up to the sun ; the garden 
itself, full of savory herbs ; and, above all, the 



148 ^EW ENGLAND BYGONES. 

trim, rotund miller, his ruddy face set off by 
a broad collar, and liis meeting suit untar- 
nislied by meal or flour. He was always wait- 
ing there every sunny Sabbath morning, so 
that he became a permanent feature of the 
landscape as seen from my grandfather's porch- 
door. The unhewn, flat stone step of that 
door was a cheerful place. Close by it were 
the cucumber-bed, the dairy-bench, and the 
beehives. 'No pans were put out to scald on 
Sunday, the unpicked cucumbers grew apace, 
and the bees revelled in blossoms. It Avas 
the brightest, homeliest, rankest spot about 
the house. 

A farm-house back-door is a paradise for 
weeds, and there is beauty in all these unbid- 
den growths of the rank soil. They are over- 
burdened with a wild scent, dense of foliage, 
deep of color, profuse of blossom, and prolific 
of seed. They locate themselves humbly and 
have few friends; but hardly one of them is 
without its use, and none of them would be 
unmissed from back-door vegetation. Here 
grew the unctuous cheeses of school repute ; 
the beggarly plantain, close up to the steps, 
good for woodland poisons; edible dock and 
mustard, and many meaner weeds, redeemed 
by their riotous rankness. They were not 
worthless, for out from them came healing and 



SUNDA Y. 149 



food and dyes. They were riot mean, for they 
were an outcropping of the force of the earth, 
and so were an eloquent miracle of the life of 
the year. 

The miller's Sunday suit cost much effort, 
from the first clipping of the wool of which 
it was made to the final handling of it hy 
Lucy and Hester, the two tailoresses, who 
measured and stitched and pressed at the rate 
of two shillings per day. It did not fit well, 
but for wear and tear it Avas unsurpassed; and 
its owner had the consciousness that it had 
been honestly paid for, and would not have for 
a long time to be renewed. The broad collars 
of the men were made of homespun linen, 
their boots were clumsy, their hands coarse 
and distorted by labor ; but they were sover- 
eigns of the soil ; strong, brave, honest men. 

The dress of the better-conditioned class of 
women was much finer. Many of them owned 
rich satins and brocades. This outlay was, 
however, only for once or twice in a lifetime, 
and the heirlooms of imported stufts which 
have come down from my grandmother were, 
without doubt, her show-dresses for many 
years. There was something sweet in this 
exalting by fine apparel of a mother of a 
household, in this hinting of vanity in these 
simple women, who would gladly have bought 



l50 J^EW ENGLAND BYGONES. 

and worn the silken fabrics which they could 
not simulate in their own webs. 

Behold the stately pomp of my grand- 
mother's church-going. Jonathan brings the 
two-wheeled chaise to the front door, and out 
from the '' spare room" comes a shimmer of 
black satin and lace, and the figure of a woman, 
large, tall, white-haired, fair-faced, handsome, 
grand as any fashionable lady of to-day. In 
the hands which on the morrow are to help 
do the family washing she carries a folded 
kerchief of fine quality, a hymn-book, and a 
sprig of Southern-wood. She looks, as I re- 
member her, with no mark of earthly toil 
upon her form and visage, like a quaint old 
portrait of a queen somewhere seen. Yerily, 
what did this woman lose by the cheerful 
taking up of life's allotted burdens ? 

Wives and daughters of the less well-to-do 
farmers seldom owned more than one '' best 
gown," and that of simple material ; but their 
clean frocks looked wonderfully well, and the 
cheeks of the lasses were brighter than any 
ribbons they could buy. They were pleasant 
to behold as they walked in procession, every 
Sunday, to the meeting-house. The wild coun- 
try round about ran riot with vegetation, and 
they were a part of its brightness. 

There was chance for romance in those 



'SUNDA Y. l5l 



church-bound walks, and many a well-to-do 
young farmer chose to go across the fields 
with his lass rather than by the dusty high- 
way. At meeting-time, by the gate of almost 
every green lane stood a lumbering market- 
wagon, waiting for the " gudewife" and her 
little ones, whilst the " squire'' and the doctor 
passed by in pretentious chaise. The highway 
was thronged with eager w^orshippers, — fathers 
and mothers, lads and lasses, many little chil- 
dren, with here and there an old man or 
woman. All were resting, happy, reverent. 
When the crowd had reached the meeting- 
house, the women and children and young girls 
passed in ; but the fathers and older sons lin- 
gered around the porch, — the former to ex- 
change greetings, the latter to stare at the 
blushing maidens. The young people were 
not free from that coquetry the seeds of which 
were sown in Eden, and which is as old as 
Eve. It took the girls a long time beforehand 
to adjust their simple dress. On Sunda}^ morn- 
ings, Molly, the miller's daughter, used to plas- 
ter water curls upon her rosy cheeks. If her 
face was not adorned bv them, she herself was 
truly made more lovely by this simple tribute 
to the church-door homage of her rustic lover. 
The meeting-house was a quaint old struc- 
ture, a fair specimen of buildings of its class 



152 ^J^W ENGLAND BYGONES. 

in those days. It had the hanging, cylindrical 
sounding-hoard; high pulpit, with its trap- 
door; railed altar; broad galleries; double 
row of small windows ; and square pews, — 
the whole built of plain, unpolished wood. 
It was not planned by skilful architects, yet, 
despite the ugliness of this old meeting-house, 
there was about it a kind of solemn grandeur. 
It was lofty and roomy, and had the vener- 
ableness which long use gives to any structure. 
Cobwebs hung in its out-of-the-way corners ; 
age had richly stained the rude carvings of its 
useless sounding-board ; and curiously-twisted 
veins and knots had come out, in long years, 
all over the panels of its galleries. There is 
something pathetic in this creeping out of the 
veins and fibres of ancient wood — as if they 
were the soul of it — to meet the destroying 
touch of time. Rare also is the aroma of these 
dying woods, breathing out from such as are 
mellow and brown and streaked with age; 
found only in old, unpainted buildings. 

On summer days, through the open windows 
of this ancient church came resinous breezes 
from the pine wood beyond it, sunshine, and 
the sounds of busy, ripening, summer life. It 
was filled also with a reverent spirit of worship, 
and by them all it was glorified into a solemn 
and goodly temple. The coming up of the 



SUNDAY. 153 



minister's white head from the trap-door, the 
nasal twang of the long-queued deacon dicta- 
ting to his choir, the contortions of the fiddler, 
were all accepted as a part of the service, and 
the people were as unconscious of any element 
of the grotesque in their worship as they were 
rich in faith and divine presence. The musical 
directors of ancient choirs might not have been 
good singers, hut they were most devout choral 
worshippers of the Lord on the Lord's Day. 
Ancient meeting-houses had no chimneys, and 
the tiny foot-stoves of the women could not 
keep their bodies warm in winter. One can 
but think that perhaps the sturdiness of these 
ancient dames was in some measure due to 
the fact that the weakly ones were, in early 
life, winnowed out by exposure to such hardy 
customs. 

My grandfather's old meeting-house on 
summer days was a picture-gallery, letting in 
rare landscapes through its windows. The 
meanest objects framed in these, and fixed by 
them upon a background of sky or verdure, 
became studies to tired, curious children, who 
let nothing pass by the doors unnoticed upon 
the visible highway. The stay-at-homes in the 
few neighboring houses were eagerly watched, 
and all the details of the houses themselves 

accurately scanned by them. They grew wise 

11 



154 ^EW ENGLAND B YO NES. 

as to the habits and haunts of meeting-house 
spiders and bugs, and noted every bird-nested 
tree which could be seen from the pews. Every 
object within range of vision they knew well by 
sight. IlTothing escaped them but the doctrines 
of the minister's long discourses. 

What country-bred person will not recall 
with pleasure such unwitting Sunday studies 
of art, when he or she learned aerial perspective 
through the upper windows of a village church, 
and the best style of lawn-gardening from the 
landscape which stretched out from their lower 
panes to the horizon ? All the natural beauties 
of the neighborhood were revealed; many 
secrets of form and sound and color were 
searched out until, through these primary 
dealings with nature, a glimpse was given of 
the fulness and richness and glory of the uni- 
verse. 

The old-time country pastors were greatly 
loved and respected by their people. They 
were treated with peculiar deference. They 
were accosted with humility and entertained 
with delight. They were poorly paid, but, like 
their parishioners, their habits were simple 
and wants few ; and many of them eked out 
their living by the use of land lent them by 
thrifty farmers. The Congregation alist min- 
isters were the most learned men of the times ; 



SU^DA Y. 155 



generally close students, rigid in doctrine, 
stern in discipline, and given to long, many- 
headed sermons. Other denominations be- 
lieved less in especial training for the pulpit 
and more in what was termed " a call" to 
preach. Laymen left their ploughs and be- 
came exhorters ; and the genuine " call" often 
developed rare power to control minds. The 
eloquence and success of some of these " called" 
preachers of my grandfather's neighborhood 
have passed into tradition. They showed an 
acuteness in the selection and adaptation of 
texts which often proved the seed of great 
revivals. Said one of these pastors, venerable 
with age, as he bowed over the coffin of an old 
patriarch, named Jacob, who in the fulness of 
a healthy and honored old age had died -sud- 
denly in the night-time, " And when Jacob 
had made an end of commanding his sons, he 
gathered up his feet into the bed and yielded 
up the ghost, and was gathered unto his 
people." The utterance, the attitude, the as- 
pect of the trembling old pastor were perfect, 
and more potent than any sermon upon this 
desirable ending of a long and worthy life. 
'At another time, leaning over the pulpit, he 
pointed to the shrouded form of a strong man, 
stricken down by the wayside, and exclaimed, 
in low and searching accents, " Who among 



156 ^^W ENGLAND BYGONES. 

you will give lieed to this ? Who Avill hearken 
and hear for the time to come V Waiting, with 
solemn impressiveness, answer came to him in 
the sudden uprising of every member of the 
congregation. This inspired old man was 
gathered to his fathers. He was greatl}^ 
missed. Even little children mourned him, 
and for a long time the mention of his name 
brought tears. 

In those days seldom was an aged minister 
cast off by his people because of his years. He 
was more apt to be endeared to them by his 
infirmities, and his speech to grow weighty 
with them in proportion to his past work and 
experience. The deference paid to him, espe- 
cially by the 3'Oung, was extreme. Plis learn- 
ing, his freedom from coarser toil, his better 
attire, exalted the minister's vocation at any 
time of life; and when to the superiority of it 
was added the venerableness of vears, he be- 
came to them a true patriarch ; like the priests 
of old, as one ordained of God and not of men. 

My grandfather's minister, when I used to 
visit the farm, was a trembling old man, with 
broken voice ; but the thought of his dismissal 
never entered the mind of one of his hearers, 
and to talk of his death as a near probability 
cut their hearts as a personal bereavement. 
Gray-haired women spoke of him as belong- 



SUNDA Y. 157 



ing to a past generation. He had buried their 
parents, had given them in marriage, and 
brought liis wisdom to bear upon the good 
and evil experiences of their after-life. He 
had been an eloquent man, and the inspira- 
tion of his speech had not yet quite left him. 
Indeed, there could be no eloquence more 
effectual than the simple appeals which came 
from the pious hearts and truthful lips of such 
well-tried pastors. From living so long with 
one people, they grew into their lives. There 
could be no joy or sorrow in the parish in 
which the beloved pastor was not called to 
share. The average sermons of those days, 
measured by rules of rhetoric, might, many 
of them, seem bare ; but most of them were 
strong in logic, and they were all full of heart 
and truth, and so of power. 

At noon, between Sunday services, the peo- 
ple scattered ; in winter, with their lunch-bas- 
kets, amongst the nearest farm-houses ; in 
summer the mothers, with their little ones, did 
the same, whilst the sturdy farmers lolled on 
the green. Lads and lasses strolled into the 
fields, where lovers sat down under the maples 
and oaks, or the willows by the brook-side. 
Children and sober maidens, like Hannah, 
were apt to turn into the church-yard. Many 
of the meeting-goers had some precious spot 



158 ^^W ENGLAND BYGONES. 

in that earth, and they never seemed to tire of 
reading the legends on the unpretending stones. 
After the hour's nooning came tlie after- 
noon's service, just as long and strong in doc- 
trine as that of the morning, and woe betide 
the uneasy youngster or dozing farmer upon 
whom the tithingman's watchful eye might 
falL Sweet were the homeward walks, when 
lovers loitered and parents grew less austere. 
The rest of the day was wellnigh past, hut its 
peace lingered. Its waning light fell with 
a soft glow upon fields and highway and 
home-hound worshippers. The latter, for a 
few transient hours freed alike from the cares 
Avhich were past and the cares which were to 
come, jrrew kindlv aiiectioned one towards 
another. This new-born life was decorous and 
sweet. Children joined one another; young 
hearts went out to meet young hearts ; and, at 
the end of every green lane, neighbors parted 
with hand-shakes and good wishes. While 
this pleasant pageant was passing from the 
highway, the herds came up from the pastures. 
The duties of the new week crowded up to 
the twilight of tlie old Sabbath, and shortly 
the highway was deserted and silent. 



CHAPTEE XII. 

OLD TREES. 

The flavors of fruits which you have eaten 
in childhood strangely cling to you. You 
taste them in memory, and your mouth liter- 
ally waters for them. You never get such 
apples now as Bill and Joe used to carry to 
the village school. They came, most likely, 
from a hoard in the hay-mow ; if so, they 
were stolen from the best trees of some far- 
mer's orchard. Happy the boy or girl who in- 
nocently ate of the mellowed apples of such a 
hoard, which had been forced into ripening in 
their nest of dried o-rass. Their flavors were 
shut in by darkness, and their scents and tints, 
wdiich would have exhaled in daylight, passed 
permanently into them. Their pulp melted 
and trickled through the fingers of eaters, 
with a deep color and a far-reaching odor. 
Brought out from the pockets of boys and 
girls, they were as bright and fresh as the eyes 
which longed for them. 

Straying through a field or pasture in child- 

159 



160 ^^W ENGLAND BYGONES. 

liood, you have come upon a wild tree loaded 
with fruit, of which you have plucked and 
eaten. You were hardy and hungry, and they 
seemed to you the best apples you had ever 
tasted. Passing that way in after-years, you 
call to mind this fruit's high relish, and are 
curious to try it again. You find the tree, 
half rotten, hut its live limbs still bearing. 
You search in vain for apples like the old 
ones. You fling them from you by the doz- 
ens, for you find them all, whether on the tree 
or on the sod, sour and knotty and mean. 
You wonder whether the fine flavor has gone 
out of the apple with the decay of the tree, or 
a keen appreciation has gone out of you. 'No 
matter which ; once you liked it, and the tradi- 
tion will always be a real and pleasant thing. 
Fruit tastes better picked up from a sod. A 
yellow apple bedded in a tuft of green grass, 
besprinkled with dew, and crisp with early 
ripeness, palatable as you snatch it, may be a 
crabbed thing when bought from a huckster's 
stall. I used to eat freely of sweets and sours 
in my grandfather's orchard, and daily made 
its round, thrusting aside the grass for wind- 
falls, puckering my mouth with acrid juices, 
flinging clubs and stones at favorite branches, 
and filling my pocket with fresh-fallen fruits. 
Very few of its apples were positively uneat- 



OLD TREES. 161 



able. This one might set your teeth on edge, 
or make your throat tingle, but you were 
likely, the very next time you passed the tree 
that bore it, to snatch at the same branch for 
the sake of the smart. Apples which, when 
carried into the house and left lying about for 
a day or two, were thrown away as useless for 
cooking, picked freshly fallen from the earth 
had a keen, spicy tang, pleasant if sparsely 
taken. 

There is hardly any wild apple so worthless 
that in it does not lurk a latent sweetness, 
waiting to be let loose by some condition of 
time or place, a racy and transient flavor to 
be caught on the wing. A toothmark sufficed 
for some of my grandfather's apples, for others 
a single mouthful ; many were to be half 
eaten, — wormy windfalls, for instance, and the 
fruits of certain trees with sodden, watery 
cores. Others, mild and fine-grained, were 
relishable close up to the hulls. A few, com- 
pact with malic worth, seemed utterly to dis- 
solve. Such fruit was to be found here and 
there in all old orchards, the delight of chil- 
dren, and oddly named by farmers' wives, 
pudding-sweets, long-noses, red-cheeks, and 
the like ; wild apples, not large, but well 
shaped, finely colored, and of good grain. 
Paths went straight from the back-doors to 



162 ^EW ENGLAND BYGONES. 

these trees, and the grass under them was 
matted and tangled. Trails were apt to lead 
from them to gaps in the walls, and much of 
their plumpest fruitage found its way into the 
hoards of thieving boys. The rich flavor of 
them all was due to their utter freshness. The 
true aroma of any fruit comes from the life of 
it, — life drawn from the sunshine, the showers, 
the air, and soil of its own locality. When 
you pluck it it begins to die. It follows, then, 
that the products of your own soil give to you 
alone their true ownership, and the finest re- 
ward of your tillage is that to you only can 
they offer their unimpaired juices. 

I knew a tree once — old when I first saw it, 
dead now — which stood in an angle of a coun- 
try garden. Close in the corner was a rhubarb- 
root, and along the fence a row of currant- 
bushes ; rank growths all of them, but good 
hiding-places for windfalls. N^ever was a tree 
so beset and persecuted as this. Its higher 
branches always hung fall of forked sticks ; 
the hard-trodden sod under it was thick with 
leaves, and the currant-bushes and rhubarb- 
root were trampled and torn. Three or four 
of its huge branches stretched over the fence, 
and the smart-weed bed underneath them was 
always hunted by eager children. Long poles 
were lying about outside, which, after all the 



OLD TREES. 163 



apples had been knocked from these overhang- 
ing- branches, were slyly thrust under the fence 
for more, and this was called " hooking" by 
the youQg pilferers. This apple-tree made 
early risers of the children of the house which 
owned it; and after a storm sharp was the 
contest for the gathering of its windfalls. It 
had a slow decay, a natural kind of ageing, and 
left off bearing limb by limb. The sparser 
its fruit was the more precious it grew, and 
the last few apples of the season were always 
the best esteemed of all. They were truly 
wonderful apples, — piquant things, — small, 
bright yellow without, mottled with brown- 
edged, crimson spots ; snow white and spark- 
ling within; tasting best when knocked out, 
late in autumn, from the fork of some high- 
up branch. It was only a great, wild, apple- 
tree, but it grew into the life of the house, and 
the whole summer long gave to it a surprising 
measure of beauty and comfort. Its blossoms 
were of pink and white, the prettiest of their 
kind, and they perfumed a whole village. The 
settino' of its fruits was the delight of all the 
neighbors' children, and the giving of them, 
when ripened, became a hospitality. They were 
thick^and beautiful amongst the green leaves, 
and the underlying sod, enriched by them, was 
the best-beloved spot of the whole garden. 



164 ^^W ENGLAND BYGONES. 

Ungrafted trees have a riotous way of grow- 
ing, making up in size what they Lack in fruit- 
age ; and tlie thinnest-hearing of them, when 
in hlossom, perfames the air as sweetly as the 
best. The trees in my grandfather's orchard 
which bore the meanest fruit seemed to have 
the most and brightest blossoms, and for a few 
days were the glory of the landscape. You 
can never forget the scent of apple-blossoms ; 
nor, when once seen, the beauty which is given 
to plain tilings by them. An old apple-orchard 
has a pathetic interest. Its trees decay slowly, 
lingering after those who planted them, with 
gnarled trunks and distorted limbs, keeping 
watch over the ruins of deserted homesteads. 
If you see a few, solitary, half-dead apple-trees 
in a field, or stumps of trees buried in suckers, 
near them you will be quite sure to find a cellar, 
— filled with stones and bricks and tangled 
wild-growth, — the site of an ancient home. 
You may find these dying old trees overhang- 
ing the walls of grass-grown country highways. 
If you will dislodge their tumbled fruit from 
between the stones, you will often be well re- 
paid by their wild and racy flavor. Even if 
you cannot eat them, they are pleasant to look 
upon ; and the tree which, in all lands, best 
holds its own, which seems nearest to you, is 
the tree which has always been a generous 



OLD TREES. 165 



giver to yon, tlie homely, grateful, apple- 
tree. 

Best of all orchards, my grandfather's, fnll of 
great trees, waxing old and weak ; with their 
trunks rotted, their barks shaggy, their limbs 
all dead at the ends. Dear old orchard, with 
your smooth turf, your many fierce-fruited 
trees, your few but sufficient ones bearing 
apples of rare worth ! Going back in mem- 
ory to your gathering, I walk straight to the 
sweet trees and the sour trees of your best 
repute. I hear the thud of your brimful 
carts, pouring their loads into the press, and 
see busy hands heaping up the fallen fruit. 
The gifts, that the summer suns and winds 
and rains have given to you, lie beautiful upon 
the earth, in balls of crimson and green and 
gold. Your yearly mission is over, and the 
air is fragrant with the life that has passed 
into them and out of you, with the growing 
and ripening of the year. I forget,— the thing 
was and is not ; the harvest was bountiful, 
and was gathered in ; the trees waxed old and 

died. 

On the side of the orchard nearest the house 
a row of later-planted trees had been grafted, 
but with so little care as to stock that their 
fruits were no better than cross-breeds, with a 
strong leaning to native wildness. Moreover, 



166 ^^W ENGLAND BYGONES. 

the trees themselves, too old for the process, 
did not take to it. They were unhealthy and 
tricky of bearing, and seemed to be trying to 
thrust off their superadded branches. Many 
of the oldest trees were rotten to the core, yet 
still persisted in bringing to the orchard their 
yearly gift of leafage, flower, and fruit. After 
a strong wind it was always feared that one or 
more of them would be found prostrate upon 
the ground. The fall of one sent a thrill of 
sorrow through the household. It was sure to 
have been endeared by some tender association, 
had been marked by a name, and was not 
lightly to be parted with. It was pitiful to 
look at its branches, heaj)ed and crushed, cov- 
ered with their last greenness ; its trunk jagged 
and rotten ; a worthless wreck to be put out 
of sight. 

The wild pear was a hard, uneatable thing, 
properly called choke-pear. Unlike the apple, 
it never surprised you by any palatable varia- 
tions, and, save that the housewives sometimes 
stewed it into a tolerable preserve, it was of 
little use. 

The garden cherries of ancient homesteads 
were less untamed, more serviceable than the 
pears. Almost every garden held two or three 
trees, the fruit of which was much esteemed 
for cookery. This cherry was round, plump. 



OLD TREES. 167 



ricWy red, and thoroughly rehshahle when 
plucked from the sunny side of a well-tended 
tree. A profuse hearer, this tree, with its high 
contrast of fruit and glossy, dark-green leaves, 
was an ornamental thing, often standing in the 
front yard of the house. It was apt to straggle 
in its growth and get shaggy as to its hark, 
hut was pleasant to look upon from its white 
hlossoming until it was stripped hy the frost. 
It was an early hloomer, thrusting out its 
snow-white petals hefore its leaf-buds had 
hurst open, almost the first floral gift of spring 
to the quickening life of the garden. All 
cherry-blossoms have an untamed look and 
scent, as if in them the richness and flavor 
which goes into later flowers had gotten snow- 
bound. They are very dainty; they come 
suddenly, and flutter and fall and melt away, 
as if they were really born out of frost-work. 
Little children used to carry sprays of them to 
school, and later they beset the trees for fruit, 
fighting with the birds for their short-lived 
harvest. I remember two great, scraggy, old 
trees, hard to climb, whose close-set branches 
nipped like a vice, but which held, quite up in 
the sky, fruit full of imprisoned sunshine. For 
several weeks, in cherry-time, they were noisy 
trees. There were always two or three children 
wedo-ed between their forked branches, who 



168 N-EW ENGLAND BYGONES. 

chattered and ate and kept a flutter amongst 
the flockins: birds. 

Half-way between the house and woodland 
was a wild cherry-tree, which bore blossom 
and fruit with a riotous profuseness. The wild 
cherry was a savage of its kind. This one rose 
straight as an arrow from a heap of rocks ; a tall, 
handsome tree. The rocks were matted with 
sumachs and blackberry-bushes, and the place 
was said to be snaky ; yet it was lovely with 
its tree and shrubbery and white flowers, and 
was always strewn, in fruit time, with broken 
twigs and forked sticks. The wild cherry is 
a prettier tree every way than the tame red. 
It is round-trunked, pyramidal, glossy-barked, 
with breezy, profuse, white blossoms and small 
black, graceful, clustered fruit, and it binds up 
in its fibres rare, healing juices. Black-cherry 
trees often stand thick along old walls, unnoted 
by the farmer until quite grown. They give to 
the rocks in spring a beauty which the sumach, 
with its crimson leaves, gives in autumn ; for 
a few days they outline a field with their pure, 
white, pendulous blossoms. Their fruit looks 
toothsome, but is pungent and acrid; yet, 
like the wild apple, when plucked from the 
sunny side of a tree, in field or pasture, it 
would not fail there to please you. E'obody 
ever plants wild cherry-trees, but they spring 



OLD TREES. 169 



up freely in out-of-tlie-way places. Close by 
fences and in rock lieaps, tliey easily escape 
hostile ploughs, and thrust themselves pictu- 
resquely out of the rubbish of a field into the 
features of a landscape. They are hardier and 
less liable to disease than the garden species, 
and the balsam which runs in their veins is not 
of more worth than are their varied aspects 
of beauty. 

Plums were once raised with little care in 
extreme ^N'ew England. Peaches were also an 
infrequent growth. Black gum has nearly 
killed out the former ; severe winters the lat- 
ter. Like all later-maturing fruits, ripened 
under the slow processes of a N^ew England 
summer, the plums were pulpy, fine-grained, 
and delicious. They are to be regretted, as 
the one thing which, in this bleak climate, 
simulated a tropical fervor. My grandfather's 
half a dozen plum-trees, when last seen, were 
black, blighted, and unsightly; and the single 
peach-tree had dwindled down to suckers, 
sprung from the past winter's blight. 

But after all the tree which has best stood 
wear and tear, which presents itself to me, 
seeking for it, with the most familiar aspect, 
is the butternut-tree by the well. No matter 
how rotten its core is, how ragged its branches, 
I love its old a2:e even better than I did its 

12 



170 S^EW ENGLAND BYGONES. 

youth. ISText to that my heart goes out to the 
trees, spared hy the woodman's axe, in the 
woodland beyond the orchard. I saw a strong 
man once crying like a child, because of the 
cutting down of an old tree upon his lawn. 
He said all his children had played under it, 
and it was a part of his life. I felt sorry for 
him, for his grief brought back to me the 
morning when I missed my great maple from 
my chamber window, and, looking out, saw it 
lying, majestic but smitten, across my summer 
garden. Of all my trees I loved this one best. 
It had been cut down by mistake, and as it lay, 
with its leaves withering in the sunshine, it 
seemed like a murdered thins:. It was lost 
from my window; it was gone from the land- 
scape ; it had been cruelly torn from the re- 
membered image of a dead child, — this speech- 
less yet speaking thing, which had grown into 
my heart. 

Trees have their social aspect. Many have 
been intimately known by me ; solitary trees, 
and clumps of trees, and forests of trees, mem- 
orable by association. How you love to recall 
the trees which grew about your old home- 
stead ! You were drawn to them by little 
things. In the forked branch of this you 
watched a bird's nest, out of the rotten trunk 
of that grew a thrifty fern, here you perched 



OLD TREES. 171 



aloft, there you swung. In varied ways the 
rugged old trees catered to your young de- 
lights and wants, and grew beautiful and dear 
to you. Trees were my childhood compan- 
ions, constant to me and I to them. I learned 
their tricks of costume and ways of growth. I 
cannot this day tell in what dress I loved them 
best ; whether in the tender green of spring, 
the deeper colors of later days, the crimson 
and gold and russets of autumn, or the soft 
grays of the dying year. There were groups 
of trees in pasture and lowland at my grand- 
father's, which are joys of memory, because of 
rare shadings and colors which were cast upon 
and overlapped into them by the passing of 
the seasons. There were four trees standing 
in the middle of the rocky pasture whose inter- 
locked branches were unfolded, like the pages 
of a richly-illuminated book, by the autumn 
ripening of their leaves. Standing by them- 
selves, they were the most prominent things 
to be seen, bright as flame in the sunshine. 
They were yearly emblazoned upon the gray 
pasture, and it was as if the condensed rich- 
ness and ripeness of the year had poured into 
them its old wine. 

All woods have their speech : grim old 
woods, tangled and matted and solemn and 
dark ; treacherous woods, wet and mossy and 



172 ^EW ENGLAND BYGONES. 

fall of pitfalls ; odorous woods, bright witli 
ferns and flowers and streaks of sunsliine. 

Looking at painted forests, there are apt to 
come to me things never put upon canvas; 
such as the sweet odor of a smoking, resinous 
wood, caught at midnight from a burning 
forest; a subtle, far-reaching, never-to-be-for- 
gotten scent, the breath of dying pines. With 
the scent comes also a little cottage planted 
against a savage background of blackened 
trees and smouldering sod, a weird forest night 
scene, burned into a child's imagination. ]^o 
country habitation could seem more alone 
than this house at midnight, close by the high- 
way, in the heart of a forest, dimly disclosed 
by moonlight, its lamps all out, its tenants 
sleeping, so lonely, so fragile, so exposed, and 
yet so peaceful, so strong, so safe, respected 
by map's humanity, watched over by God's 
providence. 

Of all voices of the woods and the night, 
the low wail of the whippoorwill is the sad- 
dest. It was a bird of ill omen to farmers' 
wives, and the woodland passed into evil re- 
pute because it was haunted by one. Any 
sound thrust in a forest upon the silence of 
night is positive, and what would be unnoticed 
in the daytime becomes a terror or a support 
to the benighted traveller. The thud of liis 



OLD TREES. 173 



horse's hoofs and the rattle of his wheels do 
not shut out the slightest crackle of twigs, and 
he hears many strange sounds which he cannot 
disentano'le from the darkness. 

I hear, as if just passing it, on my way to 
my grandfather's, in the heart of the long 
forest, the lapping of a pond at night upon its 
shores. The horse shies at the waves and the 
driftwood, the wheels grind into the sand. 
The hridge at the outlet is said to be treach- 
erous, and the outlet itself is sullen and dark. 
In the mile-away horizon the moonlight brings 
out the one little cottage by the inlet, within 
a stone's throw of which its owner went down 
through a treacherous breathing-hole, into 
which he had driven from across the pond one 
cold winter's night. My companion tells the 
old story, and adds to it later accidents. Mean- 
while we near the bridge and the inlet, which 
seems to yawn to swallow us in. We urge 
the horse carefully, and he, with half-human 
instinct, plants his feet reluctantly upon the 
bridge. It sags to one side, and the water 
ripples past the wheels. We hold our breaths 
for a minute, and then the passage is made. 
It was a foolish thing to do, but the risk gave 
to me a remembered rare voice of a solitary 
old wood. 



CHAPTEE XIII. 

THE DISTRICT SCHOOL. 

See the children as they used to come from 
the village school, — a noisy little moh, ripe for 
mischief. A wagoner drives along. The boys 
swarm upon his cart like bees, tangled to- 
gether and dangling behind with scarred and 
mud-stained feet. The farmer either " whips 
behind" or leaves the struggling mass to dis- 
entangle by a gradual dropping off. The chil- 
dren who were left stop a moment. Poised, 
expectant, they all stand, until some foremost 
fellow plunges his broad bare feet into the 
hot, soft sand, scoops it along, and flings it 
aloft. Away they all rush, with a whoop 
and a hurrah, ploughing along the road, half 
smothered by the dust they fling about them. 

I^othing could be more charming than the 
groups of school-bound children in early sum- 
mer mornings, simply clad, chattering like 
magpies, making the air ring with their 
laughter. Their prattle was mostly of flowers 

and birds ; of the treasures of fields and pas- 
174 



THE DISTRICT SCHOOL. 175 

tures and woods, and their many little adven- 
tures in their close dealings with nature. They 
were as hardy and untrained as the mullein 
and hardhack and wild rose of the unploughed 
roadside ; and they were as sweet to look upon 
as were the blossoms of these weeds. 

In summer the scents of fields and woods 
used to get into the school-rooms; especially 
of the ferns, which sprang up all along the 
stone walls, by the roadside, and in the damp, 
shady corners of the fields. What country- 
bred child does not remember these tender, 
dainty roadside ferns which the children used 
to stick in the seams of their desks, and 
into every available crack in the school-house 
walls ? Beds of them grew crisp in a field back 
of the school-house in my grandfather's dis- 
trict, where the grass around them was above 
the heads of the smaller children. The man 
who owned this field was at war with the 
scholars, for they would pluck the ferns, and 
the way to these led through his longest grass. 
A wild cherry-tree stood in the centre of this 
field, and its ra2:2:ed wall was covered with 
berry-bushes. When it was mowed scythes 
were tripped by hard-trodden trails, and the 
old farmer was heard to say to his men one 
summer that " the young cusses" had cat up 
his field like a checker-board. He hacked up 



176 ^EW ENGLAND BYGONES. 

the fern -bed 5 cut down the cherry-tree, and 
tore up all the wayside berry-bushes. But 
dear old Mother Nature outwitted him, and 
the next year the ferns came up again as rank 
as ever ; strawberries and wild-fiowers grew 
where the tree and bushes had been ; the eager 
children made new trails after new things, and 
crisscrossed the field worse than ever. 

There was something delicious to the chil- 
dren in their stolen marches upon this forbid- 
den field. I see them now, leaping at recess 
past the gap in the wall (that gap which would 
never stay mended) into their trails, neck 
deep in grass, tumbling and tripping as they 
went. Their faces are beautiful, framed in 
memory by the ferns and grains and grasses 
of long since dead harvests ; they bring with 
them an Indian summer after-glow of senti- 
ment. 

The school -house yard was a sunny spot, 
defined by four flat corner-stones, good for the 
game of goal, crisscrossed by two hard- trod- 
den paths, and littered by loose-lying sticks 
and pebbles. Its stone wall was jagged, 
thistle-lined, and much beset by bees. In the 
corner next to the school-house was an ever- 
present gap. You know how handy such 
wall-holes used to be in your childhood ; how 
your bare feet clung to the smooth rocks, 



THE DISTRICT SCHOOL. 177 



which had tumbled to the other side. You 
have doubtless yourself helped make them in 
pasture boundaries, or been the bruised vic- 
tims of unpremeditated breaks. Nobody ever 
seemed to know how this hole came. It was 
a school mystery, incessantly mended and as 
incessantly undone. 

Close by this gap was one corner of the goal- 
ground. The lively game of goal was played 
by the girls at recess, the largest ones claiming 
the stones and right of way. They flew eagerly 
from rock to rock, cheeks aglow and hair 
streaming. The smaller girls either watched 
them or strayed alongside forbidden fields for 
wild forage. The game of goal was too tame 
for the boys, who, when their turn came, 
rushed uproariously out, skimmed along the 
walls, tumbled with somers.aults into the fields, 
hurrahed up and down the highways, irrespon- 
sible, dirty, happy; seldom getting through 
recess without a free fight. The small boys 
played marbles on the sunny door-steps, or ex- 
changed pocket treasures around the school- 
house corner. When the teacher's knock put 
an end to the uproar, they tumbled in as they 
had tumbled out, marvellously disentangling 
at the threshold of the school-room. 

The teachers of the winter schools were a 
mixed race. Well-educated farmers sometimes 



178 ^EW ENGLAND BYGONES. 

eked out tlieir incomes and. filled up their 
winter leisure by teaching school. Such were 
always savage disciplinarians. A hoy seemed 
as tough of hide to them as " Cherry" and 
^' Brindle," who drew their carts. They were 
fertile in punishments and cruel with the 
ferule, — green, birchen, supple ferule, used 
for the tingling and blistering of so many 
outer integuments. These teachers were apt 
to be nasal readers, but they were infallible in 
spelling, geography, and book-keeping. They 
were not much given to oral instruction, but 
followed one up closely in the multiplication 
table, abbreviations, and laws of punctuation. 
The village teachers were called masters and 
mistresses, for many of them a fitting title, 
mimic despots as they were. Often bright 
young men, for the sake of the meagre pay, 
taught these schools. They were apt to have 
a hard time of it, and had to be strong of 
muscle and will not to get " smoked out," or 
unmercifully bothered by uncouth tricks. The 
winter schools were rough. Farmers' boys, 
freed from work, many of them grown to 
man's estate, flocked to them with slate and 
copy-book and text-books, to lay up that stock 
of school learnino: which was to make them 
oracles in the village stores, moderators in 
town-meetings, and representatives to general 



THE DISTRICT SCHOOL. 179 

courts. They were difficult to manage ; puz- 
zled the master with hard sums and knotty 
questions, and roared out their conceits like 
young giants. They stamped through the 
snowy entries, shaggy-coated, puffing like en- 
gines, ruhbing their frosty ears ; uncouth, yet 
honest, patient, and full of a rude humanity ; 
worthy, hard-working farmers that were to be. 
Here and there one different from the rest, a 
" queer fellow," so called, drifted apart from 
his school-mates, so that, years after, they 
were wont to turn wearily from their ploughs 
and boast that in boyhood they had mated with 
a famous man. 

The zeal of all of them was great after learn- 
ing. Their patience was pathetic. The dullest 
of them hacked away at their books as dog- 
gedly as they did in summer at the rocky soil. 
Passing along the highway in winter even- 
ings, you might behold, through the exposed 
windows of farm-houses, young boys deep in 
their tasks, by the light of tallow-candles and 
open fires; and it was pleasant to see the " old 
folks" watching them with a sweet pride, only 
surpassed by the conceit of the young learners. 
The books they used were few and seldom 
changed; but they seemed then to be good 
enough, and the recitations from them were the 
best of their kind. These district schools were 



180 iV^ir ENGLAND BYGONES. 

nurseries of talent and ambition. Their condi- 
tions of severity and restriction have sent forth 
great and famons men. The most laggard 
scholars were yearly bettered by them, and the 
bright ones got from their three or four winter 
months of hard study as much as most boys 
and girls get nowadays from nine months' 
tuition. 

The discarded books of these schools are 
often found in the closets and garrets of old 
farm-houses, with their thick brown covers and 
worm-eaten leaves. Their text is of quaint let- 
tering, but their sense is unabated by time, and 
one feels tempted to go back to the use of these 
potent things of the past, whose obsolete rules 
have taught so many wise men. Turning them 
over and following them is like talking w^itli 
friends who, long ago, helped to make us what 
we are. Did you never, in later life, run across 
a reader (long since out of print) which w^as 
used by the schools of your youth ? Its pages 
seem as familiar to you as nursery rhymes, and 
you feel towards it as tenderly almost as if it 
were a human thing, — this stilted old reader, 
whose solid literature was one of the stumbling- 
blocks of your childhood. You have not for- 
gotten its standard declamations and dialogues, 
thrillingly rendered by loud-voiced boys and 
girls ; and the oft-repeating of its much prose 



THE DISTRICT SCHOOL. 181 

and rhyme made you forever intimate with 
them. The names of men who made your 
school-hooks are househokl w^ords to you, and 
when you woukl teach your chikh^en, your 
tongue trips upon the rules which they taught 
you. 

What unpenned literature is hound up in 
books ! The stories printed on their pages are 
often less pathetic, less tragic, than the real life 
scenes which touch or sight of them can bring 
back to you. I confess to an awe in handling 
ancient books, and follow their tender, mouldy 
pages as if I were in the presence of their past 
ow^ners. The fading names upon their fly- 
leaves have the helpless significance of all me- 
morials of the dead. There is a sad delight in 
rummaging through an old library, — in drag- 
ging out from corners and upper shelves vol- 
umes tucked aw^ay as Avorthless, but redeemed 
into preciousness by past use of them. Books 
that you used in your school-days, you curi- 
ously turn over for the marks you left in them. 
Gift-books, which have been thrust aside, are 
taken back, for the memory of him or her who 
wrote upon their blank leaves pleasant mes- 
sages. Guide-books and books that you read 
upon journej^s thrust their titles upon you, and 
set you again on your travels. Books once 
read with friends quicken your memories of 



182 ^EW ENGL AND BYGONES. 



social life. Books with strange names in 
tliem, picked up from stalls, affect you like 
human waifs; and ancient books, of quaint 
dialect, like ghosts of the past. But before 
all others are the books which never get tucked 
away in corners : those which were read last 
by the loved and lost. How many have such, 
with marks left in; pencil touches; a stray 
letter; names scrawled, — pitifully meagre, un- 
satisfactory traces of hands which can never 
again turn them ! Take from me my books, 
most of them, if you will, but do not dare to 
touch the precious volumes in blue and gold 
turned slowly over by the fingers of my dying 
child. They left no soil on the page, but their 
sacred imprint is no less indelible to me. Dear 
old books, all of you, — no matter how much 
your printed leaves lie, the overlapping text, 
legible alone to faithful love, can never be 
false ! You may grow mildewy and musty, but 
ever tender and beautiful shall be the associa- 
tions with which you are bound. 

Ancient school-houses were not built for 
comfort. Their seats were high and narrow, 
their desks awkward and inconvenient. Their 
chimneys were large, fireplaces broad and 
smoky, and the floors in front of them were 
sure to be worn with the tramp of uneasily- 
seated children, who in winter Avent up to 



THE DISTRICT SCHOOL. 183 

them in never-ending procession. The worst- 
used place in the whole district was the school- 
room. Youngsters hewed and hacked at their 
desks with a revengeful persistence. The 
plastering of the walls was covered with rude 
inscriptions, and the ceiling overheard bespat- 
tered with ink and paper squibs, l^o boy or 
girl ever plead guilty of any of these mars 
and blots, but many additions went each term 
into the aggregate of this spontaneous fresco- 
ing. The old school-room in my grandfather's 
district was full of scrawls and names and 
quaint maxims. Almost every teacher had his 
or her profile in it, done in tolerable outline by 
roguish fingers, l^o law had force against this 
custom. The scribbling of the school-room 
had become a second nature to the scholars, 
and it seemed less culpable because the rough, 
blotched walls upon near inspection resolved 
themselves into art exponents of child-life; 
made up of outline leaves and flowers and birds 
and scraps of rhyme, — crude pictures of what 
had gone into and out of the children's days. 
The marring of school-rooms thus, in one 
sense, becomes their embellishment. The 
names, Avhittled indelibly into desk-lids and 
door-posts, and all the traces of bygone child 
possession, — these are the true ghosts of 
scholars and school-days that are past. 



184 NEW ENGLAND BYGONES. 

In summer the rows of small, opposite win- 
dows in old school - houses, open upon the 
children's necks, inured them to drafts; and 
nothing could be purer than the breezes which 
blew from every quarter of the heavens into 
these wide-opened rooms. In winter up the 
big chimneys went most of the heat, and with 
it all the bad air ; whilst through cracks and 
chinks w^ithout number blew the biting but 
health-giving north wind. It was hard on 
little boys and girls in corner-seats ; but then 
they were w^ell wrapped up in homespun suits, 
and were always going to the fire to w^arm 
their tingling fingers and toes. Every comer 
into the room let in a blast of cold air. At 
recess the bo^'s tumbled into the snow, and 
came back shakino- it from their o-arments. 
Two or three deep in a semicircle they hugged 
the fireplace, and sucked at snow-balls crushed 
in their half-frozen fingers till the tap of the 
master's ferule sent them unwillingly to their 
desks. 

The floor about the fireplaces was always 
sopp}'- in w^inter with incoming snow^, and in 
summer w^as sure to be wet from slate-w^ash- 
ings and the careless upsetting of dippers. 
Close by it, upon a low bench, stood the water- 
pail, the filling of which on summer days w^as 
a rare privilege to the older girls. The spring 



THE DISTRICT SCHOOL. 185 

was quite far away, close by the edge of a 
wood. It was a pretty siglit to see tliem burst- 
ing into the school-room, staggering under 
their load : rosy, laughing, with their aprons 
fall of flowers and mint from the brookside. 
The water of the spring had a snaky repute, 
but it was freely drank of by all the children, 
and in various ways catered largely to their 
comfort and delight. On hot summer days 
the larger girls used to splash it about, and it 
would trickle down the aisles to scatter in 
dust-bound globules over the dingy floor. 

Peculiar, positive, and unlike any other, 
was at night the summer odor of these school- 
rooms. The thick dust, ground fine by the 
tramping of restless feet, elsewhere musty, 
here seemed to be scented with the withered 
roses and ferns and mint left behind them by 
the half-wild children. Apple-cores, scraps 
of paper, and bits of pencil were scattered 
about, and now and then the sweeper came 
across something from out the treasures of a 
boy's pocket. The latter often in school-hours 
found a way to the floor, and got lodged in 
the teacher's desk. It was curious to look into 
the children's boxes, and see in them how mis- 
chievous boys and girls had wliiled away the 
laggard hours; how many apples and ginger- 
cakes had been slyly eaten, and cubby-houses 

13 



186 ^E^V ENGLAND BYGONES. 

built from books, unbeknown to the teacher. 
The desk of the latter, fast locked, was always 
frao-rant with confiscated fruit. 

The aspect of one of these rooms after the 
day's work was over was tenderly suggestive. 
It was a place out of which a jocund life had 
gone, and the waste scattered around was 
made up of such things as the children had 
gotten out of their stay in it. There was 
something poetical in this leaving behind 
them the scents of the weeds and blossoms 
which they had plucked, — the fading memo- 
rials of the delights of a day that had passed. 

The person who found solid comfort in the 
winter schools was that master wdio boarded 
'round in country districts, and tasted the 
cream of kindness in farmers' houses. He 
sat in the best seat, in the corner, through w^in- 
ter evenings, book in hand, reserved, prim, 
feared, if not hated, by the youngsters. His 
presence quickened the life of a household. 
Best dishes were brought out, and dainties 
came upon the table. The " fore room" was 
most likely opened, and neighboring farmers 
came in of evenings to converse with this son 
of learning. The housewife was more spruce 
in her attire, and the children were "fixed 
up" for the occasion. Some of these masters 
were like watch-dogs, and from their corner 



THE DISTRICT SCHOOL. 187 



no covert sneer escaped tliem. The hard 
school usage of many a boy and girl dated 
from dislike come of these transient tarryings. 
The summer school-mistresses, mostly farm- 
ers' daughters, seldom brought much learning 
to their tasks, but they were generally good- 
natured, and in favor with their scholars. 
Hard-worked mothers sent their younger chil- 
dren to them as freely as if they had been 
hired nurses, and the lower row of seats was 
always full of the druling, sleepy little things, 
with legs helplessly dangling. Patchwork and 
samplers were allowed in these schools, and 
curious pieces of their faded old needlework 
are still to be found in country farm-houses. 
The securino' of the summer schools was often 

o 

the cause of ill-feeling. Much canvassing was 
done, and committeemen were chosen with 
reference to particular candidates, who went 
before them to be examined in arithmetic, 
grammar, geography, and writing. The school 
pay was meagre, but a large item then to the 
girl of simple tastes and habits. 

It was astonishing how much the glory of 
the summer depended, to the children, upon 
the nature of the mistress. All the sunshine 
they got in their school-hours seemed to pass 
through her; and by her disposition, as much 
as by the book lessons she taught them, she 



188 NEW ENGL AND BYG ONES. 

did her work at moulding their characters. A 
cross mistress turned their sweet into bitter, 
and made the otherwise happy days long and 
wearisome. The children took upon such 
their natural revenges. They brought her no 
flowers ; they lagged at their books, and with- 
drew from the aspect of the room much of its 
wild summer adornments. But this was only 
a transient suppression ; outside they were the 
same romping, riotous, nature-loving children. 
If you have fortunately been one of these 
school-children, you recall the features and ac- 
cidents of my picture, — the low-roofed school- 
house; its adjoining wood-shed, littered with 
chips; the beaten play-ground; the outlying 
field, full of buttercups ; the wayside, thick with 
thistle and mullein and hardback; the over- 
hanging trees, the fallen fruit of which was 
lawful plunder; the near wood; the far-oif 
mountains ; the blue sky overhead ; the sun- 
light; the shadows; the moving life of the 
scene. You see the traveller comins; down 
the thread of a highway on the distant hill ; 
the f^irmer's daughter spreading her clothes 
to bleach in the orchard; working-men and 
oxen in the fields ; the shimmer of the near 
stream. You hear the brook's babble and 
the hum of the insects ; the song of birds and 
the drowsy undertone of nature. You see and 



THE DISTRICT SCHOOL. 189 

feel it all, — the onward processes of life ; the 
unerring growth of the year; the resistless 
tramp of time. Very much would you give to 
leap back for a day upon the old goal-ground, 
that you might lie upon the grass, a scholar 
and a dreamer, and again watch that narrow 
landscape, which grew into you with a fruitful 
minuteness, and which has been the stable 
groundwork of the best landscapes of your 
maturer life. 



CHAPTER XIY. 

AFTER THE SUMMER. 

Jocund country harvests ; blessed dying days 
of the spent year, — how delightful, seen from 
an upland, was the exuberance of your finished 
vegetation ! Farms were like gardens, with 
patches of corn and later grain and clover and 
soft-tinted second grass. Orchards w^ere full 
of apple heaps ; pumpkins and squashes dotted 
the fields; sumachs flaunted by the roadside 
and outlined the walls ; forests were aflame ; 
bushes kindled in field and pasture. The earth 
was alive with workers. The life of every 
household seemed to have poured itself out 
upon the landscape, to wdiich, beyond the 
brightness given to it by the deep-dyed colors 
of the perfected year, was added that after-glow 
of the summer, which marks the true harvest 
days. These days are the richest of the year, 
for they hold its dying, its life, and its resur- 
rection. They are full of its miracles. The 
incoming season is pushing out the old ; and 
the husks which are thrust out in the process, 

190 



AFTER THE SUMMER. 191 

the stubble of the cornfields, the withered vines 
and weeds, the things that have been blighted 
by frost, or sapped by the fruits which they 
have borne, lie thick on the brown earth. The 
refuse of the outsfone life and its incomino- 
fruits are fused together in a sort of mellowed 
glory, — a final and transient burst of brightness 
from the spent season, which is giving back to 
the farmer tenfold for his labors. 

To one driving at night through the country, 
what can surpass its beauty, the offspring of 
its devastation? Over all, fair and solemn and. 
stately, watches the harvest moon. There is a 
gray glitter to everything. Objects bristle in 
the clear, cold air. Shadows beset wood and 
highway, and lie upon rock and hillock and 
field and pasture. Shadows lurk in corners, 
stalk before and stretch out behind. The whole 
landscape takes life. Trees and fences seem to 
move, and far-away objects play pranks with 
your horse. Every sound is crisp in this 
night air. The frisking of your little dog 
through the wayside bushes snaps their twigs 
like the click of pistols. Anything stirring 
in the wood, or out of it, sends an echo flying 
over the resonant fields. Farm-houses and 
barns are brio;ht with harvest lis^hts. Distance 
and moonlight lend charm to mild festivities, 
and girls, seen from the highway, move and 



192 NEW ENGLAND BYGONES. 

work amon2:st tlieir sheaves with a classic 
grace. If the doors of the barns are shut, 
then from cracks and crevices and gable win- 
dows streams the ruddy light, and merry as 
bells burst out the singing voices of young 
men and maidens. Their songs are mostly 
quaint ballads, swelling full upon the night 
air. 

One of these old barns was an attractive 
place, with its ceiling lofty and cob webbed, its 
gable-windows far up and dusty and dim, its 
walls flanked on either side by solid mows of 
sweet-smelling hay, which clung to the boards 
and beams way up to the rafters. It was full 
of the odor of the dried ferns and flowers that 
had been en tang-led and cut down with the 
grasses ; and ladders and working-tools, lean- 
ing against its mows, blended in beauty with 
its many-shaded browns, as did every senseless 
thing and dumb beast and living man within 
its walls. 

Behold an ancient husking-party, — merry 
gathering. The barn is dimly lighted by can- 
dles in tin lanthorns, hung high on pegs. The 
homely structure sufters a night-change into 
a lofty hall, with arches and stained roof and 
fretted beams. A new life seems to be born 
into the withered grass. It clings to and 
twines about the jagged wood with a fantastic 



AFTER THE SUMMER. 193 



carving. A whole year has gone into the mix- 
ing of the colors of this picture, in the sha- 
dows of which sit the huskers of the corn 
harvest. The brawny arms of young men and 
the plump arms of maidens keep time to their 
music. Some are breaking the ears from the 
stalk ; others are stripping the husks from the 
ear, lightening their tasks with the babble of 
flying tongues. Stout men bear brimful bas- 
kets of golden ears to the granary ; heaps of 
cast-off stacks are made compact ; crisp white 
husks pile up against the shoulders of the girls 
and fly about their ears; cheeks grow red 
and eyes brighten; spirits rise; jokes are 
cracked ; pranks played ; and many a flirtation 
plied with unconscious grace. The end comes 
at length, the last basket is sent out, the husk- 
ing is over. The thrifty farmer, who has slyly 
put back his clock and delayed his supper, 
blows a horn, and just as the lanthorns begin 
perhaps to wane, out from the barn burst the 
rustic merrymakers, eager for the harmless 
festivities of farm-house parlor and kitchen. 

The supper is abundant, homely, and whole- 
some, and the huskers, with appetites sharp- 
ened by labor, partake heartily of it. The 
hardy workers keep no late hours, and mid- 
nio-ht finds the farm-house silent and deserted, 
whilst groups of merry youths send their 



194 ^EW ENGL A ND B YG ONES. 



cliatter and laughter eclioing back from lane 
and field. 

On the morrow the host will go out early to 
inspect his granary, and make right any care- 
less assorting of ears. The stalks will be 
stowed away on highest mow for future feed. 
If kindly disposed, he will leave the ragged 
butts to be picked over by careful housewives. 
How forlorn these women looked, with shawls 
pinned over their heads, rummaging for white 
husks ; intent, silent, plying their task with 
bare and sinewy arms, their wrinkled, care- 
worn faces tanned by exposure, it was hard 
to think of them as having once been rosy, 
laughing girls, handsome helpers at bygone 
huskings. They tramped along the highway 
with crowded baskets and bundles, satisfied, 
and unconscious that in thus taking up the 
fag-end of the harvest they were only gray 
workers and bearers of burdens. Their husks 
made sweet beds, and the mats they plaited 
were serviceable and cleanly. 

Busy, prudent, working woman ! the same 
thrift which has spread her joints and hard- 
ened her face has also helped to build her 
comfortable home. Here are the shining pans 
on the bench beside her; the kitchen-garden, 
just beyond, alive with bees; the water-barrel, 
half buried in sunflowers; the plantains and 



AFTER THE SUMMER. 195 



burdocks ; tlie wood-pile, tossed about, with 
axe and cliopping-block near it,— all incidents 
of a pleasant picture, for tliis is tbe back- 
door of a farm-bouse, and this woman tbe 
simple housewife, whose walk in life is with 
these homely things. 

She was plump and fair and rosy-cheeked 
once. In childhood she roamed the fields and 
pastures, and went to the village school. As 
she grew older she had much heart in rustic 
merriment. She showed taste in dress and a 
love for flowers. A natural grace was born in 
her. Something called gentility came to her, 
so that the garments she wore fitted and became 
her. She had her little romance, begun and 
ended at an apple-bee or husking. Dressed 
in her prettiest frock, with a bright ribbon at 
her throat, she was then most unlike this hard- 
faced woman standing by her door. Here 
she is a background to part of her belongings. 
She has burnished the pans, and weeded the 
garden, and dipped water from the barrel day 
after day. Suns have risen and set, years have 
begun and ended, and the wearisome - cares 
have also come round in never-varying pro- 
cession, until she has gotten to be what you 
now see her, a patient, faded worker,— the 
spinner and weaver and purveyor of a house- 
hold. 



196 ^EW ENGLAND BYGONES. 

These hand-maidens of nature, isolated from 
art, unconsciously expressed much beauty in 
their humble wares. The webs they wove were 
unadulterated, pliant, and lustrous; their dyes, 
drawn from homely weeds, were rich and 
tenacious; their polished bowls, scooped out 
from knotted wood, were prettier than any 
silver plate; their flax- wheels were stringed 
instruments ; and many things of their daily 
handling were elegant for shape or color. 

"Who has ever seen a more pleasing sitting- 
room than that of many an old-fashioned 
country-house, with its deep-toned homespun 
carpet, its dark mahogany, its tall clock in the 
corner, its narrow mantel, high up, filled with 
sea-shells and a stray vase or two ; its low walls ; 
its windows shaded by lilacs and overhang- 
ing elms? The brass knobs on drawers and 
doors, and in chimney-corners, were pleasant 
spots of brightness. The brass-tipped, lion- 
clawed table-legs were the best-made things 
of their kind. The clock in the corner, with 
its quaint machinery, its involved registering, 
and its loud ticking, was the unlying chroni- 
cler which was to last long after the family 
died, — a thing beautiful for the richness of its 
material and the stately expression of its form. 
A soft brown pervaded the room, which was 
brightened through its windows by more per- 



AFTER THE SUMMER. 197 

feet landscapes than could be bought for 
money, perfumed by scents which no art 
could bind up for sale. The curtains and car- 
pets, the threads of which were dyed with 
barks and weeds, had the wild color of things 
which had grown in fields and woods. 

Farm-houses were busy as bee-hives in au- 
tumn with the peculiar work of the season. 
Their sunny sides were hung with strings of 
sliced apples and pumpkins; yards were lit- 
tered with barrels and casks and loaded carts ; 
sheds were crammed with the outpouring of 
the year. The women were eagerly taking 
up the loose-lying threads of their work, 
chopping, pickling, preserving, assorting their 
butter and cheese for the market, setting 
their d^^es, and making their woollen webs 
into garments. 

When the harvests had been gathered in, 
the mellow flavor of them seemed to pervade 
the whole house; and there was not a room 
which was not in some way graced by the 
])roducts of the past year. The garret was 
crammed, and the kitchen beams were hung 
thick with earth-grown things : strings of 
bright peppers, bunches of herbs, long-necked 
squashes, braided seed-corn, and much else 
precious to the farmer, — summer forage of his 
fields. The most valued gifts of his farm were 



1 98 NE W ENGLAND B YG ONES. 

kept here, in siglit and out of reach, — the sa- 
cred seedlings of the coming year. The cellar 
beneath was full of the fatness of the past 
season. From its bins came the odor of many 
field crops; out of casks and barrels the scent 
of the year's vintage. 

The farmer is planted in his chimney-corner. 
His year's work is over, his harvest is gathered 
in. Asleep by his hearth-stone, with the ruddy 
firelight dancing over him, he is a picture of 
calm content, — an honest man, with few wants, 
enriched by nature, and so made happy by her. 
His room is also fire-gilded into a place of rare 
delight. The fruits which he has by hard 
labor wrought out of the earth's bosom, strung 
over and around him, cling like carved things 
to the beams and walls ; so that, without know- 
ing it, this homely man sits, a life study, by 
his own hearth-stone. 

With the ending of the harvest peace seemed 
to fall upon the farm-houses ; they were filled 
with the glow of blazing fires and the inturn- 
ing of the out-of-doors life. It was a simple, 
sweet life. Memories of winter evenings spent 
at my grandfather's come back to me. They 
bring to me the glory of age, the simplest forms 
of domestic life, and the beauty of winter 
landscapes. They give to me a perfect fire- 
side picture in a quaintly-furnished room, in 



AFTER THE SUMMER. 199 

the cliimney-coriier of which sits an old man 
with flowing white hair, a beautiful old man. 
Outside, to the fiir-aAvay horizon, stretches the 
undulating, snow-covered landscape, on which, 
in gray outline upon a white ground, one sees 
many beautiful things which were hidden by 
the verdure of summer ; many shapes which 
have been revealed by the dying of leaves and 
irrass. Skeleton trees and bushes and naked 
woods seem to be thrust out in aerial mezzo- 
tint — soft, gray, and shadowy. The piercing 
flrelight streams through the windows, and 
stretches out and joins hands with the moon- 
beams, and goes dancing over field and pas- 
ture, even to the far-off hills. 



CHAPTEE XV. 

WINTER PLEASURES. 

IIow utterly transforming to the country is 
the first positive snow-fall of winter! It is a 
thing of life ; it clings and hangs everywhere. 
Its great, fluffy ridges and folds put out of 
sight fences and rocks and hillocks and high- 
ways, and bleach the gray surface of the land- 
scape into a dazzling whiteness. Under this 
new veneering the most untidy farm-houses 
are beautiful, and the worst-tilled fields as 
good as the best. Waking up into such a 
change some winter morning is like going into 
a new world. It is coming out from the gray 
mourning of the almost dead year into a sub- 
lime white silence. 

Every country-born person can recall such 
greeting of an early snow, to meet which he 
has gone forth with elastic step and heart. 
Slowly and picturesquely motion is thrust upon 
the scene. Walkers, scuffling through the 
light snow, trail slender paths along; smoke 
coils from chimneys; cattle are let into the 

200 



WINTER PLEASURES. 201 



sunny barnyards; life spills out from the farm- 
houses ; troughs are chopped free from ice ; 
men begin to hack at the wood-piles and draw 
water from the wells ; teams are harnessed ; 
children start for school, — the new landscape 
is alive with workers, thrust out with startling 
distinctness from its snow background. 

Directly off from roofs and fences and rocks 
and higher hillocks, with the sun's march, slips 
this snow covering, and from the beautiful, 
evanescent picture arises another, with added 
warmth and life and color. To one drivins: 
through a forest at such a time it is as if fairies 
had been at work and laden its minutest twists 
with a rare, white burden. Snow-clad old 
wood, through which I passed years ago on 
my way to my grandfather's farm, you are as 
lovely in memory as you were in reality then. 
It is earl}^ morning. The air seems to crackle 
with the magic of frostwork. Fleecy fringes 
are fallins: from the overburdened branches 
and fling over me great, foam-like flakes ; the 
horses' hoofs sink deep and noiselessly. Foot- 
prints of wild animals are thick in the wood, 
and all along the wayside are tracks of squir- 
rels, rabbits, and such harmless things. Loaded 
teams grow frequent and sleighs fly past. The 
sound of bells is crisp and loud. Betsy pricks 
up her ears and flings out a spray-like cloud on 

14 



202 NEW ENGLAND BYGONES. 

either side. The little doo: following' after 
shoots over the wall, boundino; neck deep into 
the unbroken snow, sniffs at the tiny footmarks 
of game, plunges into the wood, and I hear 
him barking shortly after far ahead. TAvigs 
begin to snap. There is a crackle through the 
wood, the sun is climbing up, the snow is melt- 
ins:, and fallino- from the trees sinks with a 
flufty sound into the cooler bed below. Sharp 
and distinct is the voice of this dissolving pan- 
orama. As the sun gets power the snow gar- 
ment shrinks, and all of a sudden it glides off 
from the grim old wood. 

Often a mist or rain, coming upon the newly- 
fallen snow, cr^'stallizes it into solid shapes, 
and the sun gives to this frostwork a bewil- 
dering beauty, l^othing could surpass my old 
wood thus clad. It was a sublime, many- 
arched, crystal cathedral, outlined with flash- 
ins: brisfhtness. What a transient thins: it 
was ! As quickly as the sun gilded it, just so 
quickly did it demolish it. Glittering pillar 
and frieze and cornice suddenly disintegrated, 
and under the gra}^ naked, old trees thick- 
strewn twists and fast-meltins: icicles were all 
that was left of this palace of carved ice. 

IIow short the Avinter da^'S used to seem ; 
how clear-cut they were by snow and cold and 
lack of growing life. A\^hat winters those 



WINTER PLEASURES. 20 



o 



were of forty yenvs ago, when snow-drifts blot- 
ted out the features of a landscape and lev- 
elled the country into a monotonous white 
plain ; when people woke in the morning to 
lind their windows blocked up, and the chief 
labor of months was to keep their roads open. 
Much joy the young people got out of these 
same snow-drifts. The crusts which hid the 
fences gave them ample coasting-fields, and 
they burrowed like rabbits in the drifts. I re- 
member a village, beloved by Boreas, which 
was beset by mimic Laplanders, who used to 
call out to surprised travellers from their caves 
in the piled-up wayside. In this same vihage 
the adventurous boy used to shoot over high- 
way and fence, across fields, past a frozen 
brook, up to the edge of a forest a mile ofi^'. 
His small craft was liable to strand by the way, 
and lucky was he if he did not bring up 
against the jagged bark of some outstanding 
tree. Ilis sled w^as home-made, of good wood, 
mortised and pinned together, and shod with 
supple withes, wdiich with use took a polish 
like glass, and had seldom to be renewed. 
' Boys and girls slid and coasted through 
their childhood, and this keen challenge of 
the north winds, this flinging of muscle against 
the rude forces of winter, shaped and strength- 
ened them for after-labor. Tlicy glided along 



204 NEW ENGLAND BYGONES. 

the highway, over tlie ruts made by iron-shod 
wood-sleds ; they guttered the snow-drifts with 
tracks ; and wherever the rain had settled and 
frozen in the fields or hy the wayside, they 
cleared and cut up the ponds with their swift 
flying feet. Ploughing knee-deep through 
freshly- fallen snows to the village school, 
roughly clad, rosy cheeked, joyous, they 
eagerly beset passing sleds and sleighs, hang- 
ing to stakes and clinging to runners, from 
which they tumbled into the school-house en- 
try, stamping it full of snow. The girls were 
not a whit behind the boys in their clamor 
and agility. They slid down the steep snow- 
banks and up and down the ice-paths, swift 
and fearless, and burst into the school-room 
almost as riotously as the boys. 

Tea-drinkings were the usual social diver- 
sions of the farm-house winter life. They 
were prim occasions, on which the best china, 
linen, and silver were brought out. Pound- 
cake and pies and cheese and doughnuts and 
cold meats were set forth, and guests partook 
of them with appetites sharpened by the rarity 
of the occasion. INTeighbors from miles away 
Avere liable, on any fine winter's evening, to 
drive into my grandfather's yard for a social 
cup of tea. The women took ott' their w^aps, 
smoothed their cap-borders, and planted tliem- 



WINTER PLEASURES. 205 

selves, knitting-work in hand, "before the 
hearth in the best room. The men put np 
their horses, and coming back, they stamped 
their feet furiously in the entry, and blustered 
into the sitting-room, filling it with frosty 
night-air. They talked of the weather, of the 
condition of their stock, of how the past year's 
crops held out, and told their plans for the 
coming year. The women gossiped of town 
affairs, the minister, the storekeeper's latest 
purchase, of their dairies, and webs, and lin- 
ens, and wools, keeping time with flying fin- 
gers to the tales they told. The unconscious 
old clock in the corner kept ticking away the 
while, and Hannah, in the next room, set in 
order the repast, to wdiich they did ample jus- 
tice, growing more garrulous when inspired 
by the fine flavor of hospitality. They came 
and also went away early. When the outer 
door and big gate had closed after them, there 
had also gone out with them all extra move- 
ment and bustle from the household. Every 
spoon and fork and plate was already in its 
place, the remnants of the feast had disap- 
peared, and the family was ready to take up 
on the morrow the slackened thread of its 
working ways. 

The leave-takings of these ancient hosts and 
guests were simple and beautiful. They shook 



206 NEW ENGLAND BYGONES. 

hands and passed salutations and good wishes 
with as much gravity as if they had heen going 
to some far land ; and the pleasure which the 
visitors avowed in the graciousness shown 
them was heartfelt. Merrily jingled their 
hells from out the farm-yard into the high- 
way, and softly dying out with distance, the 
sound came hack from the far-oif hills in 
pleasant echo. 

Tender, true hospitality, simple customs, 
rare entertainments, you left no sting, no 
weariness hehind you. You gave and impov- 
erished not. You were ungilded hut digni- 
fied and decorous, healthful and pleasure- 
giving. If you were plain, you were not 
inelegant, for your silver was pure, your 
china quaint and costly, your linens were 
fine -twined, your viands were well cooked 
and wholesome. You were simply served to 
simple guests, hut not without etiquette and 
the essence of style. The host carved with 
dexterity, and the hostess, in her husy passes, 
was instinctively ohservant of the tastes and 
needs of her guests. That which garments 
lacked in material and make, the ruddy fire- 
light imparted to them, painting these rohust 
farmers and matrons into rarely - costumed 
pictures. What of high culture was wanting 
to their speech, was given to it hy the sweet 



WINTER PLEASUPiES. 207 

piety and purity of it. They talked of wliat 
made up their daily lives, and that was the 
yearly marvels and glories of ever-dying ever- 
renewing nature. The men, discoursing of 
winds and rains and cattle and grasses and 
trees and grains, stumbled upon many truths 
of high philosophy ; and, reviewing with earn- 
est faith the sermons of the Sahbath-day, 
showed themselves well grounded in all gos- 
pel doctrine. The w^omen, innocently prat- 
tling of the webs they w^ove, drawing in and 
out the threads of much discourse, mixed with 
it many a iine-spun sentiment, and the golden 
overshot of the few but keenly relished diver- 
sions of their serious lives. The servinof-maid 
and serving-man listening to them, and catch- 
ing the glow of the firelight past them, went 
into the background of the picture, to be 
quaint creatures of remembered scenes. They 
themselves, observant and reverent of their 
elders, felt the sweets of liospitality in their 
own hearts; and in ministering generously 
unto others were themselves being ministered 
unto. 

The w^inter lull of vegetation was often spent 
by my grandmother and Hannah in the spin- 
ning and dyeing and weaving of Avoollen fab- 
rics, to be afterwards fashioned into quilts. 
The most esteemed of these were made of 



208 NEW ENGLAND BYGONES. 

glossy, dark flannel, lined with yellow, with a 
slight wadding of carded wool. For such a 
quilt the best fleece was set aside, and many 
dyes steeped in the chimney-corner. Fastened 
to a frame, it was in summer the fine needle- 
work of the house. Neighbors invited to tea 
helped to prick into it, stitch by stitch, the 
shapes of flowers and leaves. They came early 
and bent over it with grim zeal, helped on by 
the gradual showing of the pattern. They 
loved to take out the pins and roll up the thing, 
counting its coils with delight. The quilting 
of it was hard work, but the women called 
this rest, and were made happy by such simple 
variation of labor. They kept up their harm- 
less babble until sundown, when one, more 
anxious than the rest, catching sight of a re- 
turning herd, would exclaim, "The cows. are 
coming, and I must go." Shortly they might 
all be seen hurrying hither and thither through 
green lanes, back to the cares which they had 
for a few hours shifted. 

The finishing of this quilt made a gala day 
for the neighborhood. It was unrolled and 
cut out with much excitement. "When Hannah 
took it to the porch-door to shake it out, the 
women all followed her, clutching its edges, 
remarking upon the plumpness of the stitched 
leaves, and the fineness of its texture. It was 



WINTER PLEASURES. 209 

truly a beautiful thing, for it was a growth of 
the farm, — an expression of the life of its occu- 
pants, a fit covering for those who made it. 

The winter diversions of the young people 
were just as simple as those of their elders. 
What could be quainter than the singing-school, 
held in a country school-house, with its rows 
of tallow candles planted along the desks, and 
its loud-voiced master pitching his tunes ? The 
young men sat on one side and the maidens 
on the other. Its wdld music was heard far 
away. The tunes sung were of long repute, 
and what was wanting in melody and har- 
mony w^as made up by the zeal with which 
they were roared out. To many of the singers 
the walk home was the best of all, when, in 
undertone, they lengthened out the melodies 
which had been taught them. 

Apple-bees and spelling-matches sometimes 
brought together the fathers and mothers of 
the district, as well as their sons and daugh- 
ters. The former were apt to mean frolics, 
which carried more confusion than profit into 
a farmer^s kitchen. The latter were the occa- 
sions of much healthy merriment. 

After all, the true zest to these diversions 
was given to them by the bright moonlight, 
which generally brought them to pass. It was 
a welcome comer, and turned the introverted 



210 NEW ENGLAND BYGONES. 

evening life of the farm-liouses out into illu- 
minated lanes and liigliways. Solemn liigli- 
ways on gray winter evenings ; one got easily 
bewildered in them and thrown off from his 
track. Objects loomed up out of the snow, 
and harmless things took strange shapes and 
looked ghostly in distance and whiteness. 
Horses were apt to shy, runners bounced Avith 
a sharp click upon the uneven path, and bells 
rang sharply in the clear, cold air. Merry, 
merry bells, telling of coming and departing 
guests, — the one jocund voice of winter, putting 
the traveller in heart, making glad the listening 
ear, ringing right joyously into farm lane and 
yard, — who does not welcome with delight the 
old-time jingle ? The sound of country bells, 
struck out by the slow, measured pace of farm- 
liorses, was of prolonged measure. It was 
deep, too, because the bells were made large 
and of good metal. The peculiar sound of each 
farmer's bells became as much his personal 
possession as his own voice, and they were 
quite sure to last his lifetime. As much as the 
winds the bells gave voice to the season. It 
was joyous mostly, yet with a wild pathos in 
its music when dying out in tortuous country 
ways, with that sad indistinctness of any sound 
which has wellnigh passed into silence. 

Akin to the bells for sweetness of cxpres- 



WINTER PLEASURrS 211 

sion were the farm-liouse lights, starring the 
landscape and telling the traveller of peaceful 
indoor life. Driving through the country, si- 
lent with the rest of winter, one cannot over- 
estimate the companionship and friendliness 
of the lighted windows of outlying hahitations. 
The hreaking of a, farm-light upon your sight 
is like the grasp of a living hand, and with it 
comes out to you the peace of firesides ; by it, 
unawares, people send forth to you the warm 
glow of hospitality. An unlighted house in 
the sparsely-settled country is most forlorn. It 
is a body without a soul, — a thing which ought 
to be alive and is not. 

In the simplicity of ancient country life the 
homespun curtains were seldom let down at 
eventide. The farm-houses were mostly the 
length of a lane from the roadside, and so the 
pictures of their indoor life were sent out from 
their small windows through a softened per- 
spective. What could be better than the 
white-headed old man dozing in one chim- 
ney-corner; the dear old grandmother nod- 
ding in the other; the middle-aged son and 
daughter resting over light work ; the back- 
log, getting ready for its raking up; the Avails, 
hung with tokens of sleeping child-life, such as 
slates, caps, and comforters, — homely things, 
. catching the light of dying embers ! 



212 ^BW ENGLAND B YG ONES. 

How bright the winter sunsets were, how 
clear and starlit the nights, how bracing and 
electric the air, how much more generous than 
harsh was that climate which, while it blotted 
out vegetation, at the same time spread over 
the landscape a great spectacular glory ! 

Shut in by frostwork from sight of the out- 
of-doors w^orld, have you never, when a child, 
breathed upon an icy pane ; and, through the 
loophole thus made, caught a condensed view 
of the glories of a winter's day ? 

Picturesque upon snow were the most com- 
mon movements of farm-life. Men, chopping 
logs, seemed more like players than workers. 
With what steady swing their axes rose and 
fell — how these glittered in the sunshine ! 
The chips that flew freely about, tilted at all 
angles, how fresh they were, with their pret- 
tily-marked lines of yearly growth, their 
shaggy bark, and their scent of sap. The 
sound of the axe was resonant and cheerv, 
putting life into a farm-yard. It echoed still 
more pleasantly from a woodland, whence it 
came with a muffled indistinctness, like a 
regular pulse-beat of labor. The choppers 
seemed never to tire ; only they stopped now 
and then to brandish their stiffened arms, and 
gaze at their growing piles with thrifty pride. 
They wore mittens of blue and white, striped, 



WINTER PLEASURES. 213 

or knit in a curious pattern, called '' chariot 
wheels," by the housewives. Many of them 
had leathern patches upon thumb and palm. 

How contentedly the cattle stood chewing 
their cuds and blinking their eyes ; looking 
askance at the long icicles which hung from 
eaves of barns, and trickled drops upon their 
backs. Women came out with baskets and 
buckets for wood and water ; and, in the 
silent attitude of labor, paused for a moment 
and basked in the sunshine. Wood-laden 
sleds dragged along the highway, with bo^^s 
and girls clinging to their stakes; and the 
teamsters' shouts to " Broad" and " Cherry," 
mingled with the chatter and laughter of boys 
and girls. Roofs lazily drying, smoked in the 
sunshine; and you heard the weather-wise 
farmer saying to his neighbor, " It thaws in 
the sun to-day." 

Beautiful was the heavily coiling smoke" in 
the crisp, morning air. How deliciously its 
opaque whiteness was piled against a back- 
ground of sky. What a charming aerial wel- 
come it was from the morning life of the farm- 
house. 

Beautiful was the fantastic piling of storm- 
clouds, forerunners of winds; and beautiful 
were the rugged drifts made by flying snows. 

llush ! — I am young again. The homely 



214 NE W ENG LA ND B YG ONES. 

scenes have all come back — the old Avorkers 
into their old ways and pLaces, and the earth 
they deal with A\'raps them about with its 
splendor. Snow King, grand old master, va- 
riously carving out the features of a winter 
landscape, I salute you ! 

Dear dwellers in that old-fashioned home, I 
salute you also ! You seem to me in memory 
as stately and as beautiful as one of the tall 
oaks of your own possessions. ISTature was 
your godmother. She led you in childhood 
through her fields and pastures and wood- 
lands. She distilled for you the best balsams 
of her trees and shrubs. You unwittingly 
quaffed them as you went with her, and they 
gave you health and strength and lease of a 
long life. Tliey inoculated you with a taste 
for pure pleasures. Your frames, your man- 
ners, your desires, your Avhole life, had a flavor 
of the land that bore you. You were the true 
outgrowth, the real aborigines, the rightful, 
harmonious, delightful denizens of the soil, 
you long-dead, but never-to-be-forgotten 
dwellers in mv 2:randfather's home ! 



THE END. 



o 



